stephie louise fisher
June 22, 2012 at 6:55 pm
For what it’s worth David, I have a lot of skeptical faith (excuse the apparent oxymoron) and belong to the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion. I also believe in the cultural spirit of humanism. It focuses on the quest for knowledge and meaning through the works of men and women rather than on the ‘works’ of God, but atheism is not a sufficient description. From the time of its earliest practitioners in the west, humanism has been a celebration of human achievement in all fields of learning, art, craft, and ethics. Efforts to equate humanism with ‘secularism’, special ideologies and interests and the narrow focus on scientific achievement put forward by some organizations, has had a corrupting and limiting effect contradicting the critical spirit which humanism has always fostered. I believe in recovering for the future what the present has sacrificed from the cultural spirit of traditional humanism.
stephie louise fisher
June 23, 2012 at 10:41 am
To be more explicit: Humanism has nothing to do with ‘religion without a deity’. Humanism is not about no God or God. The word has been hijacked by modern secular and atheist organisations, but traditional Humanism is without ‘unbelief’. I believe in the renaissance of the essence of Renaissance Humanism … without unbelief.
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 23, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Jim,
‘……Quite true – far too much, maybe, happens “underneath the hood” that, I think, we’re only peripherally aware of, except maybe to a limited extent through intuitions – aka feelings: “the heart has reasons that Reason knows nought of”……..’
I have, in my time, had the pleasure of quite a bit of psychotherapy, an experience I would recommend to almost anyone who wants to try to understand what’s ‘under their hood’. Not that one finds out, necessarily. A lot of the time one just realizes that one doesn’t find out.
I have, for many years, had the epitaph for my gravestone chosen in advance. It’ll say, ‘Here lies the body of David Mills….then underneath…’never quite got the hang of it’. ?
I am especially tickled by the experiments of Benjamin Libet and those who have come after him, which suggest that conscious thought might be a bit like a news reporter who arrives at the scene AFTER the decisive action has taken place (up to 7 seconds after according to some experiments) and reports on it, making as much ad hoc ‘sense’ of it as possible.
.’…..Which is, I think, quite problematic as it tends to preclude much in the way of rapprochement, or of finding much in the way of the common ground without which I think humanity’s prognosis is not particularly favourable…….’
Sure. As a species, we tend to pick a trench, get into it, and then lob grenades towards the opposite trench. I could equally use an analogy using the word ‘tribe’ instead. I’m sure the reasons for this are very complex, and I wouldn’t dare to offer any simplistic overview, but it does seem true that the middle ground (literally, no man’s land’?) is hard to occupy.
‘…..And relative to the example of the “new atheism” you refer to I think there is great amount of value within that movement or philosophy, but also much that is, at least, quite counter-productive……’
Yes. Like most things ‘radical’, it’s double-edged.
‘…….. And relative to which you might be interested in this book review of The Righteous Mind and in this blog post which discusses it in some detail…….’
Very interesting reading, thanks. I would tend to agree more with the ‘Choice in Dying’ blog post than with John Gray (on the specific topic of ‘New Atheism’, I mean) but that’s just a personal preference.
‘……, I think, largely counterproductive at best and tantamount to destroying oneself at worst – frequently somewhat of a pyrrhic victory……’
To a large extent, I agree. To the lesser extent that I would disagree, I would say that I do believe religion deserves a good kick up the backside and that tippy-toeing around it is not necessarily counter-productive at all, but then it does depend what one is hoping to produce. I might add that by religion I specifically mean organized/institutional religion, and not an individual believer, though I accept that they may feel criticized automatically.
I think it is very important to distinguish between religion as a social/psychological phenomenon and the supernatural claims which tend to go along with it. The benign and even perhaps useful contributions of the former, especially in history though also currently, can be more easily acknowledged, and I think this is possibly what some/many atheists/scientists do not fairly acknowledge, so they appear to unkindly throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know why they do it, and can sympathize with their reasoning, but it’s not something I personally would do. I am, by nature, an ‘accommodationist’. ? Though I can be a bit radical if my gander is up.
‘….I think that more metaphorical interpretations are likely to be, and have been, of some significant value…..’
Ah, well, you certainly may have to elaborate on that one for me, because……I do wonder what value, going forward into the future I mean, religion can have.
As for my music/animation. Thank you (and steph) for taking the trouble of viewing them. On a clumsy level, I think I simply wanted to say, quite loudly and proudly, that we new atheists are not insensitive robots. I don’t know quite where I picked up the impression that anyone explicitly said we were, but I have an inkling that it may be here and there, in between the lines of criticism. I also think the word ‘scientism’ is a tad overused.
My reference to Christianity in relation to the links was simply that both remind me of what is surely one of the most poignant aspects of the belief system, that one will one day be reunited with one’s loved ones. The fact that I believe it is a mistaken belief makes it all the more poignant for me, and because of the people I am close to, I cannot watch or listen to those pieces without welling up.
David
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 23, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Steph,
Hm. I think it is going to be difficult for me to properly explain what I meant when I said that Humanism seems to me to be a bit like religion without a god (it is, of course, only my subjective opinion in any case).
Perhaps if I said that your saying ‘I believe in recovering for the future what the present has sacrificed from the cultural spirit of traditional humanism.’ Sums it up, in a way. It sounds vaguely teleological. I might be tempted to ask you, ‘why do you care about the future in that way?’ Whatever your answer, won’t it ultimately, be to do with you and what you ‘like’? That is to say, it will be normative.
Not that I find anything wrong with that, at all. I can simultaneously admire it and yet take the view that it is meaningless, apart from the meaning you give to it. I can simultaneously agree that life is meaningless, and enjoy filling it (my life) with meaning. Just as I can enjoy what appears to be free will, even though I think it may be an illusion.
Does any of that make any sense? I am not sure it will. So long as you understand that while I see your preferences as entirely arbitrary, I probably share most of them, then I hope we can share common ground. :)
stephie louise fisher
June 24, 2012 at 10:53 am
David:
I believe in recovering for the future what the present has sacrificed from the cultural spirit of traditional humanism. “Vaguely teleological”. Why? Because I care about our generation’s children and our children’s children, and the planet, and animals and think it my responsibility as a human being, sucking up oxygen and using up resources like water, to ensure they have fruitful, productive, happy lives too, full of opportunity to contribute to society, learn and gain new knowledge? Or because I used language that is can be narrowly defined as religious like ‘spiritual’ and even ‘sacrificed’?
Normative – as a part of human society. Meaningless? Arbitrary? I hear echoes of A.J Ayer. Total contempt for humanity. I don’t consider my lifelong studies and evolving philosophical position ‘arbitrary’.
Steersman
June 24, 2012 at 7:31 pm
stephie louise fisher,
I have a lot of skeptical faith (excuse the apparent oxymoron) and belong to the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion.
I believe in the renaissance of the essence of Renaissance Humanism … without unbelief.
Apart from generally agreeing with you there, I think your statements highlight, as you suggest, the somewhat problematic nuances of “faith” and “belief” that require some circumlocutions of one sort or another. And, more specifically, there are these definitions for the word “believe” that suggest or highlight those nuances or aspects:
1. To accept as true or real: Do you believe the news stories?
2. To credit with veracity: I believe you.
3. To expect or suppose; think: I believe they will arrive shortly.
Seems to me that the first two definitions are based on the “acceptance” as true of what is asserted – to act as if it were true, whereas the third one is based on the supposition, the hypothesis, that what is asserted might be true. A significant difference that seems to bedevil much of American politics, although not limited exclusively to that venue, which led John Gray in his review of The Righteous Mind to this observation:
With the possible exception of Poland, there is no advanced industrial country as deeply polarized as America is today.
While I think one can make a credible argument that it is the fundamentalists – mostly the religious variety – who are most at fault for their crossing the Rubicon from asserting to demanding the acceptance of their dogmata, one might also reasonably argue that it is something we are all prone to, to a greater or lesser extent.
For instance, there is the problematic issue of abortion. Many if not most of the religious are going to be asserting that it is tantamount to murder which might be a reasonable argument except for the fact that it is coloured, and quite badly, by their “feelings” that they are speaking on behalf of Jehovah Himself. And many of the feminists and atheists are asserting that there is no evidence for any soul or sentience – which apparently magically appears at the end of the first trimester – which certainly seems a reasonable argument – except for the niggling suspicion, a feeling, that that does some serious damage to the image, if not of “God” then the one delineated by Hamlet. As for a way off the horns of that particular dilemma? Since, staking out a position in no-man’s land between those two entrenched ones, both of those positions are predicated on some “feelings” that are, probably, ultimately unprovable one is obliged, I think, to have recourse to questions of expediency: really a question of triage, a necessary evil, a “just” war, that might provide some troubling reflections on society’s scale of values.
But, more generally, that brings me around to your later comments about “teleology” and “total contempt for humanity”. While I generally have quite a bit of sympathy for them and their underlying premises, the “humanity” statement at least seems to be predicated on the somewhat reasonable idea – seems to be based on the “feeling” – that “humanity” itself is more than just an abstraction (how can one have contempt for something that doesn’t exist?); that it possesses, at least potentially, some degree of autonomous reality which informs and motivates certain actions and purposes: teleology. However, you may or may not know of the degree to which “science” or atheism in general has some serious aversions to that concept – so much so that I get the impression that its adherents or practitioners, on hearing the word, start scurrying around looking for their crosses and holy water and wooden stakes to deal with the nefarious attempt to put the “divine [if not infernal] foot in the door”: really quite amusing, although decidedly problematic, in many ways.
For example, there’s this recent post by the biologist Jerry Coyne on the topic of “Group Selection” – “humanity” being, one might argue, the penultimate if not the ultimate one of those – which is, as the post discusses in some detail, the cause for some extensive and acrimonious internecine warfare among biologists – bit of a ridge-line in a very large watershed. In addition, there’s the book Toward a New Philosophy of Biology by the biologist Ernst Mayr which has this:
Teleological statements and explanations imply the endorsement of unverifiable theological or metaphysical doctrines in science. … Contemporary philosophers reject such teleology almost unanimously. Likewise, the employment of teleological language among modern biologists does not imply adoption of such metaphysical concepts (see below).
But, apart from my view or “feeling” that that “doctrine” is anything but “unverifiable”, that aversion has led to some remarkable contortions such as the following attempt, for example, to remove any suggestion of anthropomorphism or attribution of agency, of intent, to critters less “evolved” than we humans are:
In other words, Nagel would translate the sentence, “The turtle swims to the shore to lay her eggs” into the sentence, “The turtle swims to the shore and lays her eggs.”
And, my favorite, this amusing summary from the well-known biologist J.B.S. Haldane (significant contributions to the “Modern Synthesis”, the current theory of evolution):
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.
The upshot of all of that? Seems to me that while one can sympathize with those scientists who are apprehensive about letting that “divine foot in the door”, their fear – one might say their dogmatism if not their “scientism” – tends to preclude honest assessments of a significantly worthwhile idea – and one that has, I think, some significant contributions to a broader, if not transcendent, concept of humanism.
Steersman
June 24, 2012 at 9:15 pm
David,
… epitaph for my gravestone chosen in advance. It’ll say, ‘Here lies the body of David Mills….then underneath…’never quite got the hang of it’.
:-) Know the feeling, although I expect many do as evidenced by such phrases as “fake it until you make it”, “muddle through”, “working on a mystery without any clues” and the like.
I am especially tickled by the experiments of Benjamin Libet …
Reminds me of the book The Remembered Present by the biologist Gerald Edelman that you might be interested in or have read already; not read it yet myself but may eventually get around to it …
… I do believe religion deserves a good kick up the backside and that tippy-toeing around it is not necessarily counter-productive at all …
Yes, it seems we agree on that point; hence my willingness to disabuse the fundamentalists of their notion that their beliefs are significantly better than ones in the Easter Bunny – even if that means being somewhat rude, depending on the circumstances.
Ah, well, you certainly may have to elaborate on that one for me, because……I do wonder what value, going forward into the future I mean, religion can have.
Not exactly sure myself – bit of a work in progress. But, as indicated in my last post to you it’s partly a question of having something in the way of a transcendent vision of one sort or another, even if it is badly flawed and subject to abuse – and, of course, power tends to be that way. And I think there are a great many bits and pieces in the Bible – even Dawkins’ lists several pages (384, 385) of them – that have, at least, substantial “literary merit”. The question, for me anyway, is whether the Catholic Church in particular is able to distance itself from the literal interpretations and realize its survival probably depends on doing so.
I also think the word ‘scientism’ is a tad overused.
Yes, tends to be, particularly by the religious and various theologians in cases of “special pleading” such as this by Alvin Plantinga. A little less unjustified when argued by John Gray and Eric MacDonald, for examples.
… simply that both remind me of what is surely one of the most poignant aspects of the belief system, that one will one day be reunited with one’s loved ones.
I can sympathize with that for a number of reasons. Depending on the details of the context one might argue that, for example, that “elderly Christian woman” you refer to was honoring the spirit of her dead husband and in so doing ensured its survival, in a sense, as well as giving some credence and credibility to various “transcendent” principles. Another example along that line that I find particularly moving is Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in particular this:
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
Both cases, I would say, of a commitment to various principles that have some significant influence on the survival of the species and which manifest a fundamental “humanism” – the same humanism that you apparently don’t “subscribe” to yet apparently support or promote in your own concern for your children – and “at a stretch their children”: all part and parcel, I think, of that broader, if not transcendent, philosophy.
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 25, 2012 at 3:27 am
‘……Reminds me of the book The Remembered Present by the biologist Gerald Edelman that you might be interested in or have read already; not read it yet myself but may eventually get around to it …….’
Haven’t read it. It sounds interesting. So many books, so little time, eh? It seems to me that evolutionary biologists often get into explaining how stuff evolved to be what it is today, and while I do generally agree that everything probably has (evolved), I sometimes feel that their efforts may be limited to guessing or at best constructing plausible hypotheses which are very difficult to verify, given the problem with evolutionary timescales, generally speaking. So far, it’s been difficult enough just to demonstrate speciation in fruit fly, if you get my point. :)
Maybe some day, some day….
‘….Not exactly sure myself – bit of a work in progress. But, as indicated in my last post to you it’s partly a question of having something in the way of a transcendent vision of one sort or another, even if it is badly flawed and subject to abuse –….’
Yup. We all like a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. :)
Sometimes, I think, religious people, and even humanists (our topic group) seem to worry that without, er, some sort of ‘worthwhile’ philosophy, or ultimate purpose, or something noble to aspire to, we won’t have one (a reason to get out of bed) but in practice I don’t tend to think it works like that, so I think such a worry may be misplaced. In any case, ‘breakfast’ is quite a good enticement.
It seems to me both useful and important (could have used inverted commas there) to fully confront the idea, at least in discussion if not in life, that ‘purpose’ is, to some extent, an illusion, and that in the grand scheme of things, it may well be nothing more than a reflection of our own desires. From the viewpoint of almost any other species on the planet, we might easily be described as a pest, for all our uphill climb towards civilization. This is not contempt or disrespect for humanity. It might even be called humility and perspective, IMO.
‘……..I would say, of a commitment to various principles that have some significant influence on the survival of the species and which manifest a fundamental “humanism” – the same humanism that you apparently don’t “subscribe” to yet apparently support or promote in your own concern for your children – and “at a stretch their children”: all part and parcel, I think, of that broader, if not transcendent, philosophy……’
I am not sure that I subscribe to any ism, though I probably do, because someone somewhere which have a label for it. :) . Perhaps, even, it would be better to say that ultimately, I am subscribed, since this implies less of my having volunteered in the first place to be a member (of humanity).
Put it this way, I don’t make any noble claims for why I might give a damn about my immediate descendants. Regarding my own children, I think a shedload of personal responsibility may be in order, given that my wife and I played god as regards their appearanace (assuming we had free will, which is by no means certain, but I am willing to run with it as a working model, especially as I have limited alternative options). After that, it (the sense of responsibility) tails off.
By the way, if you have made some specific point that you were hoping I would respond to, do let me know by reminder. We are covering a wide area here. I do read your posts thoroughly. Part of the reason I don’t respond to everything is because I agree with a lot of it and partly because I type with one finger and need to go to work.
I liked your ‘the turtles swim to the beach and lay their eggs’.
david
stephie louise fisher
June 24, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Only ‘problematic’ for atheists Steersman who might have narrow views of language and logic.
David Mills
June 25, 2012 at 7:43 am
@ steph.
Uncalled for, and possibly inaaccurate and irrelevant ad hom, IMO. I wasn’t going to reply, but I decided I wanted to. I find your discussion technique unfortunately and unnecessarily adversarial, and inconsistent too, because recently at another venue, you chided me for categorizing people as atheists or not atheists, and said you hated the word, and now you refer to ‘atheist steersman’ ?
Actually, for what it’s worth, I personally had mistakenly thought steersman was a liberal Christian, or at least ‘spiritual’ and in any case, does that have anything to do with the shortcomings of his thoughts, for which I do not see any evidence that they are limited in the way you speculate? What does an appreciation of the complexities of language have to do with atheism in any case, ultimately, I might ask?
I am not seeking either an argument or a discussion with you, by the way. As I say, I think you incline to a tad too much adversary.,
David Mills
June 25, 2012 at 8:21 am
@ steph.
Apologies. I think I misread your post. You meant, I think, ‘atheists, steersman’. My mistake in thinking you were replying to me, not him. :( Whoops.
A lot of my post can be scrapped, in that case. Perhaps not all of it, but a lot of it. :) Apologies again.
Steersman
June 26, 2012 at 2:00 am
stephie louise fisher,
Only ‘problematic’ for atheists Steersman who might have narrow views of language and logic.
That is probably true, at least to some extent, and there are, no doubt, some atheists for which that “narrow view” is the case – having run across a few of them in my travels. However, I would say the problem is far more pronounced in the religious – probably related to or as a result of their literalism – which tends to make it a serious problem for everyone else. Although, of course, not everyone else sees it that way.
But, for instance and apart from the “belief” word, there’s the “argument” from them that because atheists “believe” there is no god that makes atheism a religion and therefore on par with theism. And which has been used by some to justify their argument that creationism should be taught as being on par with evolution. And in some narrow largely metaphorical sense of the word I think they do have a point, to wit:
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Which, one might argue, certainly seems like it is applicable to many atheists, particularly the more militant, if not dogmatic, cohort. However, what most of the theists, the religious, apparently fail to recognize is that some principles are more credible and carry more weight than others; that not all hypotheses are created equal; that, equivalently and paradigmatically, the hypothesis that the Earth is the center of the solar system does not have the same degree of utility and “truth” as the one that it is the sun which is the center (more or less). As Carl Sagan put it:
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. [Broca’s Brain; pg xii]
The religious in particular, although not exclusively, really do seem to have some ‘problematic’ difficulty in understanding that idea; that just throwing out a hypothesis is certainly not any justification for anyone putting any faith in it, much less for demanding that anyone else do so.
stephie louise fisher
June 26, 2012 at 2:27 pm
David: In my one sentence short response I addressed Steersman, not you. I did not address him as an atheist, I was addressing why some atheists find particular language problematic. I am well aware he does not describe himself as an atheist and he has suggested he is a panentheist among other things elsewhere.
stephie louise fisher
June 26, 2012 at 2:39 pm
No that’s right Steersman, not just some atheists, but conservative religious people too, who also hold constricted views of meaning and language. Neither having a problem though, is a problem for humanism. Humanism came out of the renaissance and is without unbelief and has always fostered critical thinking. As a celebration of human achievement in all fields of learning, art, craft, and ethics, it embraces evolving languages and ideas.
Steersman
June 26, 2012 at 6:01 pm
stephie louise fisher,
No that’s right Steersman, not just some atheists, but conservative religious people too, who also hold constricted views of meaning and language.
Ah, we have some agreement then, at least some small amount of common ground. :-)
Neither having a problem though, is a problem for humanism.
However, that is a problem, I think. If Joseph can argue, quite reasonably, that “movement humanism is not innocuous” and that it consists, to some extent, of the hijacking of core elements or “renaissance humanism” by atheists, and which is, arguably, substantially better than the views and goals of “conservative religious people”, then it seems not unreasonable to argue that both are quite antithetical if not inimical to the values and goals of that “humanism” you refer to.
Humanism came out of the renaissance and is without unbelief …
And, not to be overly argumentative, that also seems particularly problematic. It seems to me that that “humanism … is without unbelief” incorporates or strongly suggests a double negative [“not with not-belief”] and which can therefore be “unpacked” as “humanism … is with belief”. Now, I don’t have any particular problem with that in itself as I expect I subscribe to, or have some sympathy for, more than a few core elements – a few central premises and postulates and beliefs – in it as suggested, notably, by this:
The theologies of Hartshorne and Whitehead, and to a certain degree Gilkey and Tillich, with their panentheistic view of God and idealistic view of man, were fully humanistic in the proper sense of the word ….
But the wicket gets a little stickier when one realizes that beliefs have consequences in terms of their effects on and motivations for various forms of behaviour which then tend to produce ripples of one sort or another. As someone said by way of an analogy with standardized murder mysteries: if you buy a gun in the first act then you have to use it by the third (otherwise it’s a red herring or padding). And that necessitates, at least if one wishes not to be irresponsible, some degree of circumspection about what it is that one believes and a willingness to examine those beliefs and what their consequences might be. As Dennett put it in the context of science and, probably, scientism:
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
From which one might argue that scientism follows more or less from the use of that unexamined baggage, the most notable consequence might be the view that since the only tool one has is a hammer then every problem can be viewed as a nail. But relative to “renaissance humanism” I would say that the “human achievement” you refer to is one of those “articles of faith”, one of those premises that might be considered all fine and dandy yet which constitutes “unexamined baggage”. But without some answer, even a hypothetical one, to the question “To what end?” much of it seems to me to be little more than advanced basket-weaving: busy-work. As Kierkegaard put it:
Are we so sure that we have achieved the highest, so that there is nothing left for us to do except piously to delude ourselves into thinking that we have not come that far, simply in order to have something to occupy one’s time? Is this the kind of self-deception the present age needs?
I remember thinking many years ago that an amusing ending, depending on one’s appreciation for sardonic if not gallows humour, to Waiting for Godot would be for the main characters to pull out a game of Trivial Pursuit and start playing it. Certainly seems to be the response of many ….
stephie louise fisher
June 26, 2012 at 7:51 pm
No I am not contradicting Joe, sorry Steersman. The fact that you’re getting tangled up with particular words and literalism demonstrates a defence of the position I mentioned before.
Steersman
June 26, 2012 at 8:40 pm
stephie louise fisher,
No I am not contradicting Joe, sorry Steersman.
Looks to me then like you’re contradicting yourself: you are then asserting, apparently, that “movement humanism and [by extension] atheism and religious fundamentalism is not innocuous” and that that is “not a problem for renaissance humanism”. Something does not compute. Unless you think “not innocuous” doesn’t mean “harmful”.
The fact that you’re getting tangled up with particular words and literalism demonstrates a defence of the position I mentioned before.
And which position might that be? And how so? I can’t say that you’re being particularly clear on that point.
In addition, it might help if you clarified exactly what you mean by “literalism”. In the context of religious fundamentalists I generally mean Biblical literalism and, more specifically, their argument that descriptions of supernatural events and causations are “literally” true, as described.
In the context of words like “belief” and “religion” then “literalism” is totally justified and entails a mandatory requirement and obligation to provide or refer to or to use the precise meanings as described in the dictionary. Any other idiosyncratic use depends on context which the creator of such has some obligation to provide some elucidation or suggestion of – unless they just wish to be obscure …
stephie louise fisher
June 26, 2012 at 9:06 pm
No I implied or said nothing like that at all and you seem reluctant to let go of a conviction that a double negative means literally the opposite. I wrote to be more explicit above Humanism has nothing to do with ‘religion without a deity’. Humanism is not about no God or God. The word has been hijacked by modern secular and atheist organisations, but traditional Humanism is without ‘unbelief’. That is, it is not about secularism/atheism, ‘good without God’, special interests and ideologies. Obviously therefore it excludes fundamentalisms of both extremes. It just requires a little lateral thinking and imagination. So best wishes, I have several projects to complete.
Steersman
June 26, 2012 at 10:23 pm
stephie louise fisher,
No I implied or said nothing like that at all
And by “that” you mean what? That you didn’t say: “Neither having a problem though, is a problem for humanism”? Which I took to mean that you thought that “atheists and … conservative religious people who also hold constricted views of meaning and language” are not a problem for “renaissance humanism”. Either your sentence construction is rather ambiguous or highly idiosyncratic or my language parsing module needs some recalibration because that is the plain sense of that sentence that I get …
The word has been hijacked by modern secular and atheist organisations, but traditional Humanism is without ‘unbelief’.
And I pointed out that the following quote of Joseph’s seems to be central to renaissance humanism and constitutes something that might reasonably be construed as a set of beliefs:
The theologies of Hartshorne and Whitehead, and to a certain degree Gilkey and Tillich, with their panentheistic view of God and idealistic view of man, were fully humanistic in the proper sense of the word ….
If that is the case, or if there are other similar premises and principles as seems to be the case, then it seems just a little incongruous if not disingenuous, at best, to insist, as you are apparently doing, that “traditional humanism is without unbelief” does not mean that “traditional humanism is with belief”.
And in the case that it does encompass a number of beliefs [hypotheses; arguments accepted as true] then it would appear to be rather hypocritical to be throwing stones at either atheists or fundamentalists for their “beliefs”. Perfectly reasonable, I think, to be criticizing various beliefs because their lack of correspondence to “reality” or their lack of plausibility; not quite so credible, if not a case of shooting oneself in the feet, to be criticizing the act of believing itself.
It just requires a little lateral thinking and imagination.
Imagination certainly has its benefits and uses. Although unless it is anchored at some point in objective reality it tends to have substantially fewer.
So best wishes, I have several projects to complete.
Thanks; likewise, I’m sure …
stephie louise fisher
June 27, 2012 at 10:26 am
Obviously: I did not say or imply ““movement humanism and [by extension] atheism and religious fundamentalism is not innocuous” and that that is “not a problem for renaissance humanism”. And obviously I know what innocuous means.
I am quite happy that you insist on massively misconstruing simple realistic ideas. Dogmatic religions and ideologies are antithetical to humanism without ‘unbelief’.
David Mills
June 27, 2012 at 11:21 am
‘,,,,,,,,But without some answer, even a hypothetical one, to the question “To what end?” much of it seems to me to be little more than advanced basket-weaving: busy-work. As Kierkegaard put it:
Are we so sure that we have achieved the highest, so that there is nothing left for us to do except piously to delude ourselves into thinking that we have not come that far, simply in order to have something to occupy one’s time? Is this the kind of self-deception the present age needs?’
Lol. Great stuff. No need to be frightened of squaring up to meaninglessness as an explanation to…..well, perhaps everything. Quite liberating, actually, IMO, as one possibility to try to keep (juggle) in mind, along with others.
For some reason, I am reminded of the song, ‘Always look on the Bright Side of Life’ from the closing scene of ‘Life of Brian’ (which song I believe was chosen by Graham Chapman for his own funeral? Now there’s integrity and consistency for ya, probably). Sometimes, I even go as far as to think that if Monty Python haven’t covered it, it porobably ain’t philosophically worth covering. Lol.
Anyhows. I wonder if Kierkegaard would have appreciated the following cartoon, which I consider among the most pithy I can think of, so much so that I post it again here, having already posted it at another thread here at the New Oxonian which you may already have seen. Good discussion site this, don’t you think? I haven’t been back to my old haunt at rationalskepticism.com for days and days. Now, I wasn’t expecting that. Lol
http://pull.imgfave.netdna-cdn.com/image_cache/12951907962557.jpeg
Steersman
July 7, 2012 at 7:00 pm
stephie louise fisher,
SLF: Obviously: I did not say or imply …
Certainly looks to me like you did so. As I attempted to explain at some length. And which you apparently more or less ignored or rejected.
SLF: I am quite happy that you insist on massively misconstruing simple realistic ideas.
Why should that make you happy? I would think that that would either reflect rather badly on your ability to explain those ideas or that the ideas themselves are incoherent or inconsistent right out of the chute.
SLF: Dogmatic religions and ideologies are antithetical to humanism without ‘unbelief’.
Really sorry to have to say this, but that really makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me. Is it that “dogmatic religions and ideologies” are being antithetical “without unbelief”? Or that what they are being antithetical to is “humanism without unbelief”? In the latter case if you are unable or unwilling to explain precisely what you mean by the term – “humanism without unbelief” – then I think I’m entitled, if not obligated, to consider that as, at best, a falsely profound “deepity” – in Dennett’s phrasing – or simply as, at worst, outright nonsense.
Although to maybe throw you a bit of a lifeline, I can see that your “without unbelief” – aka, in my view, “with belief” – is your somewhat idiosyncratic method of differentiating the dogmatic beliefs of various fundamentalists from the more rational ones of science and “renaissance humanism”. However, as somewhat of a relevant aside, I think that Joseph’s differentiating between renaissance and movement humanism is somewhat artificial, somewhat of a false dichotomy, as even the “fostering of critical thinking” of the former and its “reverence for scientific inquiry, [its] systematic approaches to the study of literature, history, society” seems to qualify as a movement of sorts, in the sense of promoting and inculcating certain perspectives which it sees as being of paramount importance in the evolution of society and civilization. Although one might also argue, or concede, that an important difference is that the former is somewhat more circumspect about throwing the baby out with the bathwater ….
steph
July 7, 2012 at 7:38 pm
You are not a mind reader – you have misrepresented what I said and continue to do so. I did not say or imply “movement humanism and [by extension] atheism and religious fundamentalism is not innocuous” and that that is “not a problem for renaissance humanism”. Humanism without ‘unbelief’ is without ‘unbelief’ because The narrow focus on scientific achievement put forward by some self-styled “secular humanist” organizations has muddied and eroded the traditional and the modern senses of humanism. The association of humanism and secularism has eroded the positive meaning of the term even further. And the efforts of some groups to equate humanism with special ideologies and interests has had a corrupting and limiting effect which, in significant ways, runs counter to the critical spirit which humanism has always fostered. You have made your opinions clear and as far as your opinion that Joe’s and my “differentiating between renaissance and movement humanism is somewhat artificial, somewhat of a false dichotomy, as even the “fostering of critical thinking”” it’s another reason why I wrote “I am quite happy that you insist on massively misconstruing simple realistic ideas” – ie. we disagree and this overlong internet ‘conversation’ had finished, a matter on which I thought we had agreed. Haere ra Steersman.
rjosephhoffmann
July 7, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Lest there be any doubt: I regard the use of the term “humanism” to mean secular humanism or atheism to be one of the greatest tragedies of twentieth century movementology, perpetrated by second-class minds and perpetuated by third-class polemicists and village atheists. The attempt to sever humanism from the religious and the spiritual was a flatfooted, largely American way of taking on the religious right. It lacked finesse, subtlety, and the European sense of history. While it invoked its own commonsense saints like Dewey and Santayana, it also betrayed the spirit of both, and violated the great American tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, who like their progenitor Blake could still see “a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild flower.” It is really quite tragic what evisceration of humanism that secular humanism and its founders are guilty of, and in my “maturity” I think it is too late for them to change their minds. Secular humanism is destined to die a death brought on by its own self-deception,narrowness of vision, and inability to speak to the human quest for meaning.
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 7:15 am
@ Joseph,
To add to my previous post.
Analogy time again, to illustrate the way I sometimes see things……
Sciences (and atheism’s) ‘crime’, as it seems to be seen by some here, is as if it has said, ‘look, here, at the back of the wardrobe. We have made a door. It seems to lead to somewhere’, and the response by some is, ‘What? you cut a door? Don’t you realise that this wardrobe is an original by Androuet Du Cerveau?!?!’
:)
rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2012 at 7:23 am
Ha, the only question remaining is whether the use of the term humanism will be seen in the next generation as a cop out or a plea bargain.
Steersman
July 7, 2012 at 8:09 pm
David,
Sometimes, I even go as far as to think that if Monty Python haven’t covered it, it probably ain’t philosophically worth covering. LoL.
:-) There’s probably some truth to that argument. Along which line you might be interested in the book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Cathcart & Klein. Certainly seems that humour really has some important value in encapsulating some fairly profound aspects of life. For example, I’m reminded of this joke from the book:
A man is in desperate financial straits and prays to God to save him by letting him win the lottery. Days go by, then weeks, and the man fails to win a single lottery. Finally, in misery, he cries out to God, “You tell us, ‘Knock and it shall be opened to you. Seek and you shall find.’ I’m going down the tubes here, and I still haven’t won the lottery!”
A voice from above answers, “You’ve got to meet me half way, bubbeleh! Buy a ticket!”
A more prosaic or colloquial expression of which is the aphorism, “God helps those who help themselves”. And maybe somewhat of a prophylactic or counter-balance to, at least, the rather fatalistic and debilitating conceptions of God that seem most saliently manifested in the Islamic one.
But part of the reason why I have some sympathy with Voltaire’s “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him”: it is, I think, at least a useful abstraction in a great many circumstances and applications even if it is susceptible to the “sin” of reification – aka, in some sense, idolatry.
Anyhows. I wonder if Kierkegaard would have appreciated the following cartoon …
Probably; thanks, I certainly do … :-) But one might suggest that the fellow in the cartoon might want to reflect on the aphorism that “To study history is to be blind in one eye. But to not study it is to be blind in both.” Not sure what conclusions might reasonably follow, although variations on Francis Bacon’s “Debtor to one’s profession” and Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” seem like useful points of departure ….
Good discussion site this, don’t you think?
It is indeed. Certainly has some topics and perspectives that I can “get my teeth into” …
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Jim,
You said:
‘For example, I’m reminded of this joke from the book: A man is in desperate financial straits and prays to God to save him by letting him win the lottery. Days go by, then weeks, and the man fails to win a single lottery. Finally, in misery, he cries out to God, “You tell us, ‘Knock and it shall be opened to you. Seek and you shall find.’ I’m going down the tubes here, and I still haven’t won the lottery!” A voice from above answers, “You’ve got to meet me half way, bubbeleh! Buy a ticket!” ‘
One of my favourites is about the guy who says, ‘when I was a kid, I used to ask God to bring me a bicycle. Then I realised it didn’t work that way, so I stole one, and asked him to forgive me.’ :)
Steersman
July 7, 2012 at 9:35 pm
Steph,
Humanism without ‘unbelief’ is without ‘unbelief’ because ….
You seem not to notice that I’m somewhat or even largely sympathetic to your argument and that of Joseph’s – specifically, for example, that “the narrow focus on scientific achievement” is decidedly problematic – but fail to notice that my problem is with your use of the term “without unbelief” which I find simply nonsensical or largely redundant and not at all consistent with the descriptions you wish to attach to it.
Haere ra Steph.
Steersman
July 7, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Joseph,
I regard the use of the term “humanism” to mean secular humanism or atheism to be one of the greatest tragedies of twentieth century “movementology” ….
You might well be right on that point, particularly as I’m not all that familiar with all of the individuals you cite, and I sympathize with the argument – as I have indicated in my previous posts – that “severing humanism from the religious and the spiritual”, that denying or abandoning “the human quest for meaning”, is shortsighted at best, tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and fraught with the danger entailed in the Biblical proverb “where there is no vision the people perish”.
Although “secular humanism is destined to die a death brought on by its own self-deception …” might be a little premature as I expect that it is capable of doing, and has done, some evolving itself to forestall that eventuality. But I do agree that there is more than a small amount of “self-deception” in those “movements”; it is somewhat curious and quite amusing the degree to which many make a cause célèbre of their atheism and secular humanism and skepticism yet fail to see that the same sense of purpose and meaning they derive from them are virtually the same as those provided by more traditional religious perspectives and values – I expect they would be at serious loss if religious fundamentalism was to disappear overnight.
At least it would be amusing if it weren’t quite so depressing in suggesting that we’re all working at cross-purposes – “we have seen the enemy and he is us”, that we’re still “riding madly off in all directions”. As the anthropologist John Hartung rather cogently put it:
Without an analogue to heaven, eco-morality [and atheism and secular humanism and “politicized skepticism”] will suffer the same fate as communism. Ways and means are not the issue. The question remains, ways and means to what?
steph
July 7, 2012 at 10:10 pm
Without ‘unbelief’. That is without the ‘secular’ and the ‘atheist’ etc Steersman.
Steersman
July 7, 2012 at 11:15 pm
Steph,
Without ‘unbelief’. That is without the ‘secular’ and the ‘atheist’ etc Steersman.
As in, “humanism without the unbelief of secularism and atheism”? If that’s the case then you could have pointed that out a little earlier, particularly since, as you noted, I’m no mind reader. Although I would say that you’re not any better at that skill than I am or you would have known that that was what I was getting at.
However, I still think the bare term is still decidedly ambiguous and that it muddies the water more than it clarifies it; it might be useful as jargon for the cognoscenti, but decidedly a hindrance if you’re trying to find adherents among the hoi polloi.
But even so I still think the extended or elaborated term is problematic in defining that movement – “renaissance humanism” – in contradistinction to atheism: not what it is for, but what it is against – the very problem that bedevils atheism, secularism and skepticism: i.e., no vision, transcendent or otherwise. At least the process theology and process philosophy – not that I know very much about either – of “Hartshorne and Whitehead” suggested earlier by Joseph seems to give some hint or inkling of an “analogue to heaven”, of a positive “ethic that is … grounded in some actually existing infinite reality” as the basis for some workable “moral calculus”.
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 6:14 am
Joseph,
You said:
‘…….Secular humanism is destined to die a death brought on by its own self-deception,narrowness of vision………….’,
Yes. I recall discussing this with king Canute just the other day, at the beach. :)
Perhaps better to say that your slight caricature version of secular humanism may die?
Hint: The Rennaissance, however wunnerful for humanism, is unforunately, er, of the past.
‘………and inability to speak to the human quest for meaning.’
Ah yes. The quest. Which quest is that? The one for personal/group meaning, or something more, er, absolute and beyond and, maybe teleological. I ask, because I think mixing the two up is possibly part of the caricaturization which I think I see, between the lines. Though i could be wrong. :)
rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2012 at 7:17 am
Actually David, I think secular humanism is already in the throes: it has been swallowed by atheists who don’t even like the term and find it archaic, the full-frontal crowd, and looks a little like England after the War: lost its real estate and can’t find a role. Where do you get the idea I’m pumping for renaissance humanism? Much as I like Erasmus and Michelangelo, I accept their deaths as factual. What I don’t like as much are “humanists” whose bluff rejection of religion so constricts their imagination and vision of the human spirit that they see science as the fulfillment of meaning and human value.
steph
July 8, 2012 at 11:03 am
Steersman. The earliest humanist thinkers were skeptics Steersman. They were also theists. Humanism is without epithet. The efforts of some groups to equate humanism with special ideologies and interests has had a corrupting and limiting effect and compromises critical thinking which humanism has always fostered. I was describing it as without unbelief to make a point Steersman. I can’t imagine how you interpreted ‘humanism is without ‘unbelief” as a term. Most people understand the notion of unbelief. Humanism is not about personal philosophical beliefs, atheist or otherwise and neither is it therefore specifically ‘against’ them. I had hoped this was over. You seem very muddled over what Joe wrote perfectly clearly.
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 2:49 pm
@ Joseph,
You said:
‘Where do you get the idea I’m pumping for renaissance humanism?’
Faior do’s. perhaps that was more appropriate for steph. Perhaps it wasn’t even appropriate for her. I do confess I’m confused about what the issue boils down to? Why do you and steph (apparently) put the boot into Humanism and atheism? I don’t get it.
Ah. A clue:
‘What I don’t like as much are “humanists” whose bluff rejection of religion so constricts their imagination and vision of the human spirit that they see science as the fulfillment of meaning and human value.’
Would it be unreasonable of me to swop ‘humanists’ for ‘people’ in the first line there?
Anyhows, who exactly are these people? Can you provide a quote from one of them? What I mean is, so what if there are more than a few geeks out there? It doesn’t mean that their ‘shortcmings’ should be generalized, which, with all due respect, is the flavour of what seems to be happening here. Geeky scientist types do not represent atheism or humanism any more than I do. You are having a go at soft targets, I think. I personally do not know any atheuists or humanists who would say that science is the fulfillment of meaning and human value.
Btw, if by human spirit you mean anything supernatural, then yes, pretty much all of ‘em will disagree with you there. But as I have been trying to elucidate, it seems to be something approaching a canard, or at least a miscoception that not believing in that sort of sprit leads to paucity of philosophical outlook. Arguably, it’s an opportunity for quite the reverse, IMO, and sometimes I even think that it is ‘spriritualism’ in the supernatural sense which is both limiting and a cop out. A bit too pat for my liking. Like Harry potter always having a spell to get him out of a Jam. :)
steph
July 8, 2012 at 3:32 pm
How does believing in recovering for the future what the present has sacrificed from the cultural spirit of traditional humanism equate with ‘pumping’ for renaissance humanism David? Neither Joe nor I are ‘putting the boot’ into humanism. We don’t like the narrow focus on scientific achievement put forward by some self-styled “humanist” organizations, and there are plenty of them, which has compromised and eroded the traditional and the modern senses of humanism. As Joe said we don’t like self-styled “humanists” (and there are plenty of them) whose bold rejection of religion so constricts their imagination and vision of the human spirit that they see science as the fulfilment of meaning and human value. Humanism is not about being atheist or secular. And the human spirit is metaphorical. It is not about ‘supernatural’ – originally a philosophical term but now only used by atheists to describe religion and ghosts and fairies.
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 5:32 pm
@ steph,
you said:
‘We don’t like the narrow focus on scientific achievement put forward by some self-styled “humanist” organizations, and there are plenty of them, which has compromised and eroded the traditional and the modern senses of humanism.’
Such as?
As Joe said we don’t like self-styled “humanists” (and there are plenty of them) whose bold rejection of religion so constricts their imagination and vision of the human spirit that they see science as the fulfilment of meaning and human value.’
Such as?
More to the point, so what? So, some have a different way of looking at stuff. I doubt they’re going to take over the world by crushing human emotions. They’re not all bad, and for every lab technician in a white coat who thinks love is just chemicals (and who, interestingly, may be on to something very interesting indeed) there’s a Brian Cox, who appears to me to be positively lit up.
Horses for courses. We live in an age of specialization. Some do science. Some do poetry and literature. A few do both. There are unfeeling dullards who go to church every week. I’m still confused as to what the big issue is.
Steersman
July 8, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Steph,
I can’t imagine how you interpreted ‘humanism is without ‘unbelief” as a term.
That quoted part is a sentence; what you said earlier – antithetical to humanism without ‘unbelief’ – was not and so can quite reasonably be, I think, called a term (“A word or group of words having a particular meaning”).
Most people understand the notion of unbelief.
Then maybe you could clarify exactly what you mean by it as I get – via constructions such as un-clear, un-labeled, and un-leaded – that it means “not belief”. And my best stab at that, based on “belief” as opinion – more or less, is that it means facts. In which case, the term “humanism without unbelief” means “humanism without facts” – doesn’t seem like a particularly credible selling point if you ask me.
In addition, even your sentence “humanism is without ‘unbelief’” can still be parsed as “humanism is without facts”. Likewise not a good selling point as I expect it is simply untrue for one thing.
Humanism is not about personal philosophical beliefs, atheist or otherwise ….
I think you’re fooling yourself – at best – if you think that humanism – movement or renaissance – doesn’t have any beliefs as part of its own baggage. I’ll happily subscribe to both to various extents without necessarily being willing to sacrifice my first-born (if I had one) to them, but I at least will view with some degree of skepticism all of their premises and hypotheses – aka “beliefs”.
steph
July 8, 2012 at 7:28 pm
David. Names? What’s the point? I don’t really see why names should be named. There are many and it’s generally well known. Goodness. PZ Myers is one. And even he probably isn’t the most obvious. Myers won the AHA humanist of the year in 2009. I only name him because you might have heard of him. The American Humanists is an organisation. The lovely Michael Goulder (RIP) was a highly regarded biblical scholar and was a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) and became President of the Birmingham Humanists in 1993. He deliberately identified himself as a “non-aggressive” atheist in order to disassociate himself from the atheism of the British Humanists. Regrettably the President is now Richard Dawkins. Maurice Casey deliberately didn’t join when he left the church in 1963 specifically because of their focus and would be even less likely to now. As for the rest, read the forthcoming post on New Oxonian sometime.
davidjohnmills
July 9, 2012 at 3:04 am
@ Steph,
The ‘point of names’ is for me to try to understand exactly what you are on about, what it is that bothers you.
So, you said:
‘…plenty……..whose bold rejection of religion so constricts their imagination and vision of the human spirit that they see science as the fulfilment of meaning and human value.’
Do you have a quote from P Z Myers (with whom I am only vaguely familiar) in which he says something like that, about science being the fulfillment of meaning and human value?
And, even if there are some ‘unfeeling dullards’ in ‘New atheism’, aren’t there unfeeling dullards in every walk of life?
davidjohnmills
July 14, 2012 at 8:18 pm
Jim,
Thanks for the discussion. Very enjoyable. All the best to you. I may not be posting much more. Cheers, mate.
David
steph
July 8, 2012 at 7:47 pm
I know very well what I said and what the definitions of ‘term’ are. I really don’t see the point of pursuing this, especially when you go to extremes to misrepresent me. This thread is exhausted and we all have work to do don’t we? It should be clear from the context and my continual references to describing ‘humanism’ that I described humanism without ‘unbelief’ specifically to differentiate it from self styled ‘secular humanim’ etc. Humanism is not about personal beliefs such as atheism. I never said humanists have personal beliefs. All human beings do. It is about the critical spirit and in the same way personal belief is not part of critical scholarship. Humanism is not for sale.
steph
July 9, 2012 at 9:37 am
David it’s about ideology and not about simplistic quotes out of context. Neither is it only about ‘new atheists’ who claim the name humanism. Our concern is with the hijacking of humanism.
Steersman
July 9, 2012 at 3:19 pm
David,
And, even if there are some ‘unfeeling dullards’ in ‘New atheism’, aren’t there unfeeling dullards in every walk of life?
Looks like the argument is a bit of a “straw man”, doesn’t it? ;-)
Although there are, as you suggest, “New Atheists” for whom science is the “fulfillment of meaning and human value”. For instance, as I discussed here earlier, the blog Choice in Dying by an ex-Anglican priest, Eric MacDonald, whose recent post, The Humanities, the Sciences and Ways of Knowing, starts or continues the dialog on that topic by discussing the relative merits (or not) of “scientism” – the hypothetical anti-thesis to theism and “sidekick” to atheism – with this:
I am now increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is a streak of scientism running through the gnu atheism, and that a number of gnu atheists whom I respect highly have adopted this position, committed to one or more of the above conditions.
This seems to be the case with Jerry Coyne. For example, in his response to Kitcher, “The trouble with “The Trouble with Scientism“,” Jerry quite explicitly says that all that is worthwhile in the humanities is what can be assimilated to the scientific method. All else is feeling.
While Coyne is anything but an “unfeeling dullard”, it seems to me that his discounting and deprecation of feeling is just as problematic, and in as much error, as Joseph’s apparently over enthusiastic and uncritical acceptance of it as suggested by his recent quote of a poem by Matthew Arnold in the “Disqualification” thread. “Feeling” is, I think, a very close cousin to hypothesizing and revelation – both religious and scientific – but all of them very much need to be tempered and constrained by the facts.
Steersman
July 9, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Steph,
I really don’t see the point of pursuing this, especially when you go to extremes to misrepresent me.
Sorry if you think that latter is the case as I certainly don’t see it that way – more a case of trying to point out that I think that your term “humanism without ‘unbelief’” is decidedly problematic if not flat-out wrong. For instance, you quoted Joseph thusly in the “Disqualification” thread:
In the Oration, Pico extolled human achievement, the importance of learning, the centrality of the quest for knowledge, and the primacy of man as the knower of the order of universe (which he associates with the faculty of reason and not divine revelation)…
Seems to me that, with its emphasis on knowledge and reason and the rejection of “divine revelation” you couldn’t get closer to definition of atheism – at least the weaker version – in its “unbelief”. Just a little incongruous and inconsistent if not actually disingenuous to be then throwing stones at atheism and simultaneously to be insisting that its core principles are both part of and not part of your “humanism without unbelief”.
Looks to me like you’re just being argumentative – maybe a reflection of your previous “drip” comment? I’m not sure that you wouldn’t say I was wrong if I said today (the date of this post) was Monday ….
steph
July 9, 2012 at 7:32 pm
Surely you had finished this thread Steersman instead of continually contradicting what I say? Pico’s humanism was not secular or athiest. He lived before the Enlightenment, before the advances in science, and before atheism which did not evolve until the late nineteenth century, unlike the modern atheism which is often so overtly divisive (and often relgilously illiterate). I described ‘humanism’ as with ‘unbelief’ precisely to contradict the organisations which are atheist and ‘secular humanism.’ It was not a name for humanism. It was a distinction from modern humanist movement disqualifying their ideology. It doesn’t mean it’s ‘religious humanism’. It takes a very limited view of language and logic not to grasp the idea. Dripping taps don’t do anything else, like obsessively opininated people who continually contradict. It is not problematic. You haven’t understood the idea. We all have lives Steersman. Well some of us do and others spend alot of time trolling blogs. Argumentative Steersman? I originally offered a correction to David’s original perception of what humanism was and you have done nothing but contradict and misrepresent me since.
I’m just as concerned about fundamentalism as anyone Steersman. We don’t need Ophelia’s emphasis on that or other so-called ‘free’ thought bloggers on that site.
Steersman
July 10, 2012 at 1:57 am
Steph,
… instead of continually contradicting what I say?
I would call it more along the line of “disagreement and assessment” ….
Pico’s humanism was not secular or atheist.
Sorry, but I don’t see it that way. While Pico’s Oration is written in the language of theism, the essence of it seems to be, in Joseph’s words, “the rise of human responsibility” – God helps those who help themselves – and is written as “an imaginary dialog” which tends to repudiate or invalidate any literal interpretation of “God” as some sort of anthropomorphic entity. And the upshot of all of that is to put humanity in the driver’s seat with God as a minor bit player or foil at best. Which might entail some problematic hubris ….
But in addition, to the extent that “Pico’s humanism” is representative or the essence of “whole cloth humanism”, I would say that they are anything but theist – more along the line of spiritual or metaphorical or mythic. And which might reasonably come in under the rubric of at least secularism or maybe atheism, although the vision of the latter seems somewhat more circumscribed or undefined.
However, I will concede, largely on the basis of the conclusion of Joseph’s essay “Killing Humanism”, that your “humanism without unbelief” may have some utility even if I still think it is terribly vague and that, as mentioned, something along the line of “mythic humanism” might be more accurate and have a more positive spin. Unless, of course, you’re both literalists and are arguing for some literal deity to have created Adam and informed him of humanity’s options – in which case that would appear to be attempting to supplant “whole cloth humanism” with “theistic humanism”. But he specifically said:
But humanism has never been about unbelief, let alone about the sort of unbelief that contemporary secular humanism espouses. It has always been about belief in a human spirit that rises above even discredited ideas of God and government.
And it is that “belief in a human spirit” – couched in the parable or myth of Adam and Eve – that justifies the “mythic humanism” term as well as being consistent with my earlier parsing of “humanism without unbelief” as “humanism with belief” even if I couldn’t figure out precisely what belief you had in mind.
We all have lives Steersman. Well some of us do and others spend a lot of time trolling blogs.
I look upon it as an opportunity here and elsewhere, to genuflect, to the extent I’m able, to Francis Bacon’s aphorism: Reading maketh a full man; writing an exact one. At least more so ….
I’m just as concerned about fundamentalism as anyone Steersman. We don’t need Ophelia’s emphasis on that …
I didn’t mention that to point out the problem of fundamentalism but as way of agreeing with David’s argument, more or less, that religion can be as problematic as atheism in the poverty if not the pathology of its vision. And both largely because their commitment to dogma is greater than that to open-ended inquiry.
steph
July 10, 2012 at 10:33 am
Steersman it’s about history. Pico was a theist living during the Renaissance. “Pico extolled human achievement, the importance of learning, the centrality of the quest for knowledge, and the primacy of man as the knower of the order of universe (which he associates with the faculty of reason and not divine revelation)…”
“But humanism has never been about unbelief, let alone about the sort of unbelief that contemporary secular humanism espouses. It has always been about belief in a human spirit that rises above even discredited ideas of God and government.” Exactly right. Humanism is without unbelief. That’s not what humanism is about. Perhaps you ought to consider getting a blog.
Steersman
July 14, 2012 at 9:15 pm
David,
Yes, thank you also for the quite enjoyable discussion – been awhile since I’ve had the opportunity to “get my teeth into” one to the degree which we managed.
See you around – here, there, or elsewhere I hope.
Cheers,
Jim
David Mills
June 21, 2012 at 7:26 am
oops. ‘Religious faith is faith WITHOUT good evidence’ I meant to write. Remind to bring that one up at my next psychotherapy session. Lol.
Also, while I’m doing an errata, Steersman (and by the way, thanks for amending my ‘would’ to ‘wound’ in your reply) can I just clarify that when I said that it is erroneous to think that science has ‘all the answers’ I did of course mean ‘has or ever can have all the answers’.
For me, science and theology and philosophy are a bit like Islam, Christianity and Judaism, they all have a common root. No, not Abraham, but a spirit of enquiry. It is my view that science is the best too of the three, but it is not perfect and never will be.
Reply
David Mills
June 21, 2012 at 8:01 am
I am going to swear at myself in a vulgar fashion if this keeps up. :)
‘Tool’ not ‘too’ above.
Reply
David Mills
June 21, 2012 at 7:30 am
@ joseph.
Your suggestion is enticing. However, I am already procrastinating on this hobbyhorse when I should be working. A knot of guilt is forming in my tummy. Time for me to attend to making the bread appear on the table. Now, if you know a good miracle bread recipe, let me know, so that I can deploy it and so have more time for the essay you kindly suggest. :)
Reply
Steersman
June 22, 2012 at 12:35 am
David Mills,
Thanks also for your responses which, I think, include several interrelated $64,000 questions, or at least point to them, that I’ll try to address from the perspective of providing a “position essay” as kindly suggested by Dr. Hoffmann. And, as primary or salient points of reference, you said the following, with the first of them being, I think, the crux of the matter:
In a nutshell, this matter goes (politely) into the category of, ‘yes, science is incomplete and fallible….and? What is your point?’
Intuition and hypnotism are fascinating examples of what the mind can achieve, but they are not good evidence of anything non-material/non-physical/supernatural.
What is not common is any persuasive evidence that they come from where they are sometimes believed to have come from.
Yes, induction is faith, but religious faith is faith with good evidence, that is the key difference.
For me, science and theology and philosophy are a bit like Islam, Christianity and Judaism, they all have a common root. No, not Abraham, but a spirit of enquiry. It is my view that science is the best tool of the three, but it is not perfect and never will be.
And, relative to that first point and to address if not answer the question, my initial argument – the interplay and interrelation of faith and reason – was made in the general context of the rather problematic role religion and its various antitheses play, or try to play, in society, along with the various claims made by its various practitioners – cases in point being recent posts by Joseph (here and here, more or less respectively). On which topic there seems to have been some extensive discussion recently in both the “blogosphere” and in various on-line and off-line news-sources, a central element of which has been the argument, the claim – more bogus than not but not totally so, from the religious, primarily the “theologically inclined”, that religion provides a unique way of knowing that science, per se, cannot access. And one entry point into that discussion that I’ve found quite useful is the blog Choice in Dying by an ex-Anglican priest, Eric MacDonald, whose recent post, The Humanities, the Sciences and Ways of Knowing, starts or continues the dialog on that topic by discussing the relative merits (or not) of “scientism” – the hypothetical anti-thesis to theism – with this:
I am now increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is a streak of scientism running through the gnu atheism, and that a number of gnu atheists whom I respect highly have adopted this position, committed to one or more of the above conditions.
This seems to be the case with Jerry Coyne. For example, in his response to Kitcher, “The trouble with “The Trouble with Scientism“,” Jerry quite explicitly says that all that is worthwhile in the humanities is what can be assimilated to the scientific method. All else is feeling.
Now, not having read recently Jerry’s argument in its entirety I’m not sure how accurately that summarizes it, but it would seem tantamount to asserting that feeling – all or not – is therefore not worthwhile. But that seems highly questionable at best and not a little problematic, not least because it appears rather too close to science shooting itself in the foot – more or less echoing if not underlining my previous points about inductive and deductive logic providing the essential set of thinking tools that we all use to a greater or lesser degree. Although, as somewhat of a digression, that does seem a little incongruous on Dr. Coyne’s part as he has, apparently from this post by Massimo Pigliucci, asserted in effect that “there is no substantial difference between plumbing and science because plumbers test hypotheses based on empirical evidence.” And with which I would largely agree.
However, maybe that precisely highlights the problem which one might emphasize with the somewhat rhetorical question, “And where might hypotheses come from if not intuition – aka feeling?” A point that is more or less, I think, corroborated by a look at the definition:
Intuition:
1. a. The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition.
b. Knowledge gained by the use of this faculty; a perceptive insight.
2. A sense of something not evident or deducible; an impression.
But what needs to be emphasized there is that it in no way justifies concluding that any particular feeling is necessarily right or accurate, that, as you said, it in no way provides any “evidence of anything non-material/non-physical/supernatural”.
It is only to assert that the intuitive and inductive “leaps of faith” [aka feelings, aka hypotheses] may lead to knowing – through the proper use of deductive logic (aka the scientific method) to prove, to empirically test, the hypothesis – something that is simply “not evident or deducible” by any rules of inference and logic – I think Turing’s work on The Halting Problem provides examples of that, although I really don’t have a very good handle on the concept and its implications except in a very general sense. But that partitioning of inductive logic into the intuitive, feeling or unconscious (hemi-)sphere of our brains if not psyches, and deductive logic into the rational, conscious, one is, I think, only a first approximation as inductive logic or reasoning is a recognized and well-developed technique in mathematics, but under very constrained conditions. Probably indicative of the problem of induction on which “the philosopher C. D. Broad said, ‘induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy’”: a method that science, and mathematics, uses extensively, if not with gay abandon, but one on which philosophy has yet to bestow its unqualified blessing.
But the nature of that process is, I think, more or less emphasized by Massimo’s observations on intuition (the post has a link to cases where scientific “feelings”, aka hypotheses, themselves were out-to-lunch, that were anything but accurate):
As for the intuitions of experts, there is plenty of cognitive science literature (developed from studying chess players, math teachers and nurses, among others) showing that intuitions in one’s domain of expertise become increasingly reliable the longer one has been practicing in that domain.
And as a more colloquial manifestation of that, although on the negative side, there is the fairly well known and highly technical term, which you might be familiar with, from computer science known as GIGO: (If) Garbage In; (then) Garbage Out. If people start their own unique analog if not quantum digital computers – the ones manifested by the 3 lbs of finely and highly integrated and differentiated tofu that we all carry around inside our skulls – by “programming” them with bad premises, wishful thinking, “facts” that are anything but, and invalid rules of inference and logic, then we should not at all be surprised if the result is a dog’s-breakfast of half-baked schlock – which is what I argue is the case with a very large percentage of religious dogma.
Which then raises some specific questions about the problematic claims of various fundamentalists and theologians, and about precisely where they themselves have gone off the rails. And it seems that follows from being “hooked on the feelings” themselves; from, as you suggest, refusing to consider factual evidence, both for and against their positions and of which they have virtually none or have blinded themselves to because of prejudice (literally: pre-judging); from emphasizing the abstract, intuitive, inductive, integrating, and extrapolating faculty of our minds to the exclusion of the factual, rational, deductive, differentiating, and interpolating one – both of which we all have, or have developed, to a greater or lesser extent. They really remind me of sidehill gougers, those benighted and four-legged critters with legs on one side more developed and longer than on the other and who were therefore fated to move in circles – frequently ever diminishing ones – on the sides of mountains. Although one might also argue that the “sidehill gouger”, as a type, is also found amongst those who over-emphasize the second set of characteristics.
However, as somewhat of a preliminary conclusion since this “essay” is getting maybe overlong (and I’m not sure I’ll have the time to shorten it :-) ), that is not to say that all of the “intuitions” of the religious are without value. And, as a matter of fact it seems quite reasonable to argue that a great many of them quite likely have, as Joseph said of the “story of Adam”, great “staying power and instructional weight”. For instance, that one in particular speaks in great detail, I think and as a number of others have also thought, to the phenomenon of consciousness itself – something that Richard Dawkins called “the most profound mystery facing modern biology”. But regardless of where one argues the transition to conscious experience took place in the evolution of life – whether in some amoeba 3 billion years ago changing from asexual to sexual reproduction or in some of our homo sapien ancestors coming down out of the trees 3 million years ago – the story of Adam and Eve can, though not necessarily does, provide, I think, some worthwhile perspectives on the problematic aspects of consciousness itself, not to mention our fate and direction as a species.
As for the all of the ramifications of that perspective? The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam says, “Many knots have I unravelled, but not the Master Knot of Human Fate.” That is something, I think, that only humanity itself can do. But I’m not sure that it is entirely wise to be entirely discounting and rejecting all of the visions, the intuitions and feelings and hypotheses, that religion and theology, at least in their better moments, have elucidated. Though it would help greatly, I think, if they can be disabused of the notion that just because they have some feeling, some hypothesis, as to the nature or existence of some putative entity they wish to style “God”, that that necessarily makes it true: seems to me that problems multiply like the heads on the mythological Hydra when they (or anyone else for that matter) insist not that something might be true, but that it is true; the difference between the presentation of a hypothesis and the dogmatic insistence that it qualifies as a fact.
Reply
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 22, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Phew, steersman, quite a lot of material there. Luckily, I don’t take issue with very much of it, which might allow my reply to be manageable (I speak as someone who prefers conversations rather than essays :) )
Hm. So, what is the ‘position’, of your ‘position essay’, I ask myself? If it that religion should not be denigrated unduly, or that its role and contribution in history should be recognized, or that some ‘new atheists’ go too far at times, then I’d go along with that, and all the more so for the wider category of feelings, emotions, intuitions and, well, the arts, if you like, because I can imagine a very similar position essay being written on behalf of, say, poets and playwrights and artists, that is to say, setting aside the supernatural aspect which is usually religion’s special offering/claim.
If I were religious, I think I would be equally critical of some of the things Dawkins et al have said. But I am not, so, perhaps I lack the, er, reflexive urge which I think, at times, leads to them being demonized more than is warranted by those with more understandable reason than me to be offended.
Now, what exactly is ‘too far’? What can we really expect an atheist scientist who is not a philosopher to say? When does assertive become aggressive? There is no objective answer, as far as I can see. One could make a case (and I for one would, having grown up in Ireland) that religion has had it far too much its own way historically, and a sort of reaction/revolution is not unwarranted, in some ways, and revolutions, as we know, are blunt instruments in the short term, and often involve crossing the line between assertive and aggressive. In other words, I think that some aggression is ok by me, and goes with the territory (and is of course only verbal aggression after all) though I do understand that I can say this from the comfort of not being the target.
Is there paucity in a materialist/scientific outlook? Yes, of course there is, or can be, but not necessarily so, only in individual cases, or perhaps if enough individuals have institutional influence. I am a materialist and a confirmed atheist. I also lean slightly towards determinism, but prefer not to make a strong call on this, because I think it is impossible for any creature which has free will to know for certain whether it has or not, so it is one of a number of delicious uncertainties which I enjoy. Personally, I don’t think there is significant paucity in my outlook. I hope that doesn’t sound too arrogant. I am sure there is definitely some paucity in my outlook. Lol.
Given that we all here seem to be in some general agreement that many of the supernatural claims of religion are mistaken, then if this is the case (and I’m not entirely clear whether we would all fully agree) the question then becomes, ‘what should we value religion for, exactly?’ Which gets back to my earlier question, ‘science is fallible and incomplete…and?’
My view is that we would not be ‘better off’ without the arts, emotions, intuitions, even, dare I suggest, the irrational, but that we would, in my opinion, probably be ‘better off’ without religion, that is to say without any position which claimed there was a god, an absolute source of morality or anything in the nature of what is normally meant by the supernatural, because it is my view that belief in god is akin to belief in elves. This remark often elicits an angry response, in my experience, and is often, mistakenly, seen as dismissive or hostile, but I haven’t yet heard what I consider a good argument against it. As such, I believe that whether or not religion feels nice, or brings happiness, is, ultimately secondary to whether it is likely true, that is to say, something which we should use to make decisions and to act.
In some ways, we might very likely be worse off without religion, so I am only stating an overall preference. Call me an optimist, but I tend to think we could cope.
You will see I have put ‘better off’ in inverted commas just now. There are several reasons for this, not least that it is very difficult to supply an objective definition. Plus, I have no aspirations to make humanity ‘better’, except insofar as my own life and that of my children, and perhaps at a stretch their children (if they have any) is more comfortable. I do not worry about the long term. Some day, humanity will probably be a very, very thin, dirty grey layer in the geological strata. :)
Reply
Steersman
June 24, 2012 at 3:05 pm
David,
(I speak as someone who prefers conversations rather than essays :-) )
I can sympathize. Although I think that cultures which rely exclusively on “oral traditions” tend to be less evolutionarily viable… :-)
… a sort of reaction/revolution is not unwarranted, in some ways, and revolutions, as we know, are blunt instruments in the short term, and often involve crossing the line between assertive and aggressive.
Yes, quite agree. One might argue that the “New Atheism” is the sharp point at the end of the sword, or maybe its cutting edge, although somewhat less bright than when it was first unsheathed; new broom and all that. However, there is always the problem or tendency for that process to become an end itself, a frequent consequence of which is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And revolutions do have a tendency to do precisely that – The Terror probably being the best example I can think of. Hence part of my apprehension over a too-enthusiastic or uncritical acceptance of all of the principles and objectives – to the extent that they can be quantified – of that “philosophy”.
… we would, in my opinion, probably be ‘better off’ without religion, that is to say without any position which claimed there was a god, an absolute source of morality or anything in the nature of what is normally meant by the supernatural, because it is my view that belief in god is akin to belief in elves.
Yes, likewise agree; part of the reason why I tend to anathematize literalist interpretations of Scripture, although that is not to say that there has not been some value, at least of a historical nature, in the process – sort of like a booster rocket that has put a satellite into orbit. Don’t know whether you’ve read Dawkins’ The God Delusion or not – although I expect you have – but, relative to that point, he discusses a theory by an American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, which argues that a significant milestone in the evolution of consciousness was “the breakdown in the bicameral mind” – a salient feature of which was those two “chambers”, e.g., “self” and “god”. I think Jaynes was a little wide of the mark – most importantly because a synthesis seems a more consistent analogy – but religion, along with Jaynes’ theory, has some value in helping us to understand that process.
Plus, I have no aspirations to make humanity ‘better’, except insofar as my own life and that of my children…. Some day, humanity will probably be a very, very thin, dirty grey layer in the geological strata.
Ah, but what then of your grandchildren’s grandchildren? Seems then to be another of those $64,000 questions and on which I think Joseph had this cogent observation:
It is to say that an ethic that is not grounded in some actually existing infinite reality, such as God is presumed to be, must first state clearly what the grounds and perimeters of values are before proposing them as normative or significant: without such a calculus …
And the essential element there, I think, is the question or concept of transcendence which has quite a few different interpretations and varying degrees of relevance and validity. But while I don’t have a particularly great handle on much of that, although I tend to think that many of the religious perspectives are largely nonsense based on a particular bias, I tend also to think that the discussion is somewhat crippled by an apparent dearth of tangible examples of the phenomenon. However the dearth seems more apparent than real as it seems hard to think of a more common, or a more profound, miracle than the process by which some 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses turns into the magic of consciousness: emergence if not transcendence – and I would very definitely lean to asserting it contains significant amounts of both.
As for what that has to do with the price of wheat in Russia? I tend to think – on the fairly reasonable “as above, so below” principle of Hermeticism – that that phenomenon is extensible to humanity as well, even if only on the view that it is unlikely that humanity itself – at least as it is now – is the highest pinnacle of evolution that is possible. And I think that it may provide a method of accessing or defining some of the “transcendent” values that might be the basis for that “calculus” – the mathematician Ruddy Rucker in his Infinity and the Mind (never did get very far into it) suggested, maybe somewhat hyperbolically, that “Logic and set theory are the tools for an exact metaphysics” . But the following from the anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley in his book of essays The Immense Journey [highly recommended] summarizes, I think, the possibility of humanity’s further evolution quite well:
Some neurologists, not without reason, suspect that here [in the brain] may lie other potentialities which only the future of the race may reveal. Even now, however, the brain of man, with all its never-to-be-abandoned richness, is becoming merely a unit in the vast social brain which is potentially immortal, and whose memory is the heaped wisdom of the world’s great thinkers. [The Dream Animal; pg 125]
Now whether one views that possibility – the apotheosis of the collective, a “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem” waiting its hour to be born – with some degree of horror or sees it as the culmination of humanity’s dreams of a utopia, I think that those possibilities provide a reasonable set of bookends to a spectrum that we should probably give some serious thought to, in large part because, as Proverbs has it, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”.
Which is actually part of my objection to atheism in general: great for poking ruddy great holes in theism – something that definitely needs and needed doing – but not so hot for coming up with any kind of a vision that really engages the enthusiasms, the passions, the feelings of the “people”. Which is, of course, something that religion in general has done rather “well” – depending on how ready you might be to condone various “excesses”.
As for what might replace Islam’s largely juvenile mirage of a bordello or the seriously twisted if not decidedly pathological apocalyptic vision of fundamentalist Christianity? King, Country, Making the World a Safe Place for Democracy, the Greater Glory of Man and God? I certainly don’t know, but it seems to me that the possibility you suggest – “a very, very thin, dirty grey layer in the geological strata” – would be a monstrous crime and a very great tragedy, a repudiation of and a failure to redeem the vision and efforts and sacrifices of our ancestors in “our long, tortured, uphill climb toward civilization”. But without some overarching or transcendent vision of some sort, and a workable and realistic one, I think we’re quite likely to ride madly off in all directions and never attain the “superior orders whose life is divine” that we might hope for – and that we have hoped for these, at least, past 3 or 4 millennia.
Reply
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 24, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Jim,
‘…..(I speak as someone who prefers conversations rather than essays :-) )I can sympathize. Although I think that cultures which rely exclusively on “oral traditions” tend to be less evolutionarily viable… :-) ……..’
Lol. Pithy.
. ‘…….Hence part of my apprehension over a too-enthusiastic or uncritical acceptance of all of the principles and objectives – to the extent that they can be quantified – of that “philosophy”……..’
You can certainly have too much of anything. :) I understand your apprehension. But at the same time, I think the ‘danger’ is overstated. Radical does not mean guns, in this case.
And, one can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs…
‘……Don’t know whether you’ve read Dawkins’ The God Delusion or not – although I expect you have –……..’
Read it. Not especially impressed by the tone. Same for ‘Breaking the Spell’ which was just plain patronizing in parts. ‘Brights’?
I don’t especially like or dislike Dawkins. He says a lot of things which I think are very accurate and I often agree with him, but when it comes to Chairs of the Simonyi Institute for Public understanding of Science, I much prefer the current one, Marcus du Sautoy. He stays out of the anti-theism thing. I think his kids attend a Jewish school, in fact. His wife is Jewish, I think.
‘…….Ah, but what then of your grandchildren’s grandchildren? Seems then to be another of those $64,000 questions…….’
One can only think so far ahead. :)
. ‘…….However the dearth seems more apparent than real as it seems hard to think of a more common, or a more profound, miracle than the process by which some 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses turns into the magic of consciousness: emergence if not transcendence – and I would very definitely lean to asserting it contains significant amounts of both. ……..’
Consciousness is certainly an interesting phenomenon. Nothing to suggest there is anything actually transcendent about it though, in the sense of being ‘from beyond’, IMO.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish”.
Seems to me there is a lot of truth in that (just as in several places in the bible). I won’t mention opiates of the people.
‘…….Which is actually part of my objection to atheism in general: great for poking ruddy great holes in theism – something that definitely needs and needed doing – but not so hot for coming up with any kind of a vision that really engages the enthusiasms, the passions, the feelings of the “people”. Which is, of course, something that religion in general has done rather “well” – depending on how ready you might be to condone various “excesses”. As for what might replace Islam’s largely juvenile mirage of a bordello or the seriously twisted if not decidedly pathological apocalyptic vision of fundamentalist Christianity? King, Country, Making the World a Safe Place for Democracy, the Greater Glory of Man and God? I certainly don’t know………’
Check out ‘Modern Scandinavian societies’. Not utopia, obviously, but arguably some of the ‘best’ societies achieved, and also, some of the least religious, albeit coming from that influence, historically, though not the indigenous Sami version, since Christianity wiped them out. :)
,’……. but it seems to me that the possibility you suggest – “a very, very thin, dirty grey layer in the geological strata” – would be a monstrous crime and a very great tragedy, a repudiation of and a failure to redeem the vision and efforts and sacrifices of our ancestors in “our long, tortured, uphill climb toward civilization”. ……..’
Maybe it will be a pity. But it will probably be the case anyhow. And it won’t have to be a disaster striking. Evolution may take care of it. And maybe what comes after will be related to us, or maybe it won’t. Maybe it will be ‘better’ than us, or maybe it won’t. Maybe there will be no sentient or sapient life forms on our particular planet in a million years. And remind me, when is the sun due to go out, because after that, there probably won’t be any life on the planet at all, if there even is a planet. I’m only saying what’s inevitable in the long run. Not a fan of teleology, as you might have realized by now. Not downhearted or holding humanity in contempt either though, by any means. Quite like people, actually. :)
davidjohnmillsDavid Mills
June 24, 2012 at 7:03 pm
ps
Jim,
For those who are more, er, interested in the possible demise of the ‘long, tortured, uphill climb towards civilization’ or for those who think it has definitely been uphill (are we any better than any other species, I ask myself?’), there is a way of looking at atheism as the painful birth pangs of a new threshold. After all, isn’t the idea that there is something bigger and smarter than us just, well, not grown up? An abdication of personal responsibility?
David
David Mills
June 25, 2012 at 4:29 am
Jim,
A couple of extra lines of thought. So as to be equitable, one about me, the other about you.
I don’t think I need to explain to YOU (because I think you ‘get’ where I’m coming from rather well) that my, er, philosophical approach is not what I consider to be unhealthily cynical, overly laissez-faire or unduly ‘I’m all right Jack’. I like to think of it as healthily cynical, though this may be a conceit. To others, I suspect that I and a lot of other ‘new atheists’ have wandered into the unhealthy end of the spectrum. There is perhaps some truth in this, but we should be wary of overstating it or oversimplifying something which is I believe, very rich indeed, if unpalatable at first sight, particularly to non-subscribers.
Were I to attempt to sum up any philosophy I might have, I would quote Rabbi Hillel, when he said that the essence of the Torah was to not do harm to another that one would not want another to do to oneself (or words to that effect, indeed it tickles and impresses me to find that early Christianity apparently took the same line of thought and tweaked it from the passive – ‘don’t do harm’ – to the active ‘do unto others’). If anything is my ‘motto’, I might be that (though I regularly fail to live up to it, for certain).
Now, have I chosen to be like I am, or has it been chosen for me? I think that one very plausible answer is the latter, that I am simply the biological receptacle for a winning formula which can be understood by studying ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ and game theory in general, to wit, the idea that it is ultimately beneficial to cooperate, up to a point, and generally speaking, especially for sentient/sapient species living in small groups (which is arguably what we still ‘think’ we are doing). J
The point is, knowing that I may just be operating under such an influence seems to me an interesting and rewarding knowledge, rather than a grand shame.
So, as to the promised thoughts about you, rather than me.
I like your focus on transcendence. I think it is a good thing (use of inverted commas temporarily suspended). Actually, doesn’t it seem to you that the ‘eastern’ (sorry, definitely need inverted commas there) philosophies and religions have done a better job of exploring this than the abrahamic ones? Are you a closet Buddhist, or Taoist? Lol.
I recall that when I first participated in a rational scepticism online forum about 5 years ago, I was genuinely horrified to see that someone had an avatar which consisted of the slogan, ‘Jesus, love me or burn’. Gradually, I changed my view, and began to think this a very apposite summary, albeit offensive to Christians. Do you see what I am saying? Of course, ‘Christianity’ has arguably changed a lot since the early days, but then the problem is that they are still referring to the NT. J
Anyhows, I don’t disparage your search. I hope you find it rewarding.
David
David Mills
June 26, 2012 at 8:40 am
ps
Jim,
I just want to add something very briefly. When I ended my last post by saying, ‘I hope you find it rewarding’, I did not mean (and I think you probably already guessed this), ‘you are mistaken, but I hope it floats your boat’. In many ways, as often, the beauty and the pleasure is in not knowing, and of course, you may be on the better path than I.
Now, I may personally feel that I have more reason to be on the path I’m on than you have to be on the path you’re on, but that’s only my assessment, and in any case, the paths probably aren’t that far apart at all.
Steersman
June 26, 2012 at 7:34 pm
David,
I did not mean (and I think you probably already guessed this), ‘you are mistaken, but I hope it floats your boat’.
No problemo; I certainly didn’t take it as disparaging or dismissive in any way, although you, and everyone else, are of course entitled if not encouraged to take that position if you are so inclined: ideas are only ideas and not persons; criticisms of them tend only to make them better – I see the process as somewhat analogous to zone refining … :-)
But I would have responded before now except that I also have a bunch of other irons in the fire – sacrifices to Mammon and the like – and your posts raised any number of points all of which require, at least by me, some time to reflect on, analyze and respond to them. Briefly (??), a few of them (in no particular order relative to your posts):
… doesn’t it seem to you that the ‘eastern’) philosophies and religions have done a better job of exploring this than the Abrahamic ones? Are you a closet Buddhist, or Taoist?
Busted! :-) At least to some degree. But definitely seems the case. And that to the extent that Jesus’ words carry much weight – whether he was largely fact or fiction – I think it is due in some substantial measure to his apparent recourse to some of those eastern philosophies.
So many books, so little time, eh?
Amen to that; an “embarrassment of riches”. Although I tend, at times anyway, to sympathize with Ecclesiastes (12:12) on that: “… of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh”.
So far, it’s been difficult enough just to demonstrate speciation in fruit fly, if you get my point
I expect you mean the micro-macro evolution bone of contention? My impression is that the biologists say that there is plenty of proof from the laboratory for that, but that the results are not all that impressive. I have very little doubt that it took place more or less along the lines laid out by the theory, although I have yet to see an explanation as to how, for example, the number of chromosomes can change from species to species – not to say that there isn’t one floating about somewhere. But I tend to think that evolution, as a theory, is most definitely still a work in progress, a major deficiency in which is, I think, its failure to incorporate “consciousness” as a significant factor.
assuming we had free will, which is by no means certain, but I am willing to run with it as a working model, especially as I have limited alternative options
As someone said: “I believe in free will, but I have no choice in the matter”. But I tend to view that dichotomy – free-will versus determinism – as similar to the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity: both have their ranges wherein they apply and outside of which they don’t.
I liked your ‘the turtles swim to the beach and lay their eggs’.
In what sense? Because you think it more accurate? Or because you think the circumlocutions involved are, maybe, somewhat amusing? If the former then I would tend to disagree with you as it would suggest a belief that consciousness is a phenomenon unique to humans – maybe somewhat uncomfortably close to the views of many religious fundamentalists, even if for different reasons. In addition it seems not supported by various studies on animal behaviour which show some fairly strong evidence of problem solving abilities as well as being self-aware. Maybe somewhat moot whether those are truly indicative of consciousness but certainly suggestive of that.
Reply
david mills
June 27, 2012 at 3:46 am
Jim,
Ditto on the sacrifices to mammon. There are expensive teenagers to fund, mortgages to pay. I have been spending too much (enjoyable) time on our conversation already, so perhaps now is a good time to say it has been good and that I may slow down on it, but not stop entirely.
Regarding evolution, yes that (the micro/macro thing) was sort of my point. The idea that things don’t evolve seems virtually obtuse, even if we do not yet know all the mechanisms.
Regarding consciousness, I tend to put this in a similar category, something we have a pretty good general explanation for (though not as good as for evolution), namely that it emerges naturally from the brain/body, even if we don’t yet know exactly how, or can demonstrate/recreate it, and can’t think of a good reason to attribute it to agency, let alone outside agency.
I am, by the way, one of those who finds materialism not one iota less fascinating than the alternatives.
Regarding turtles, if I were to guess, I’d say they were conscious, at least to some degree, but I could be wrong. I’d guess that there is a boundary somewhere, probably in the animal rather than plant kingdom, at which consciousness emerges. I’d probably attribute it to chimps and elephants, who I believe pass some of the experimemntal tests (you know the sort, they paint a red dot on the forehead, present the animal with a mirror, and the animal reaches up to the dot, because it appears to have an idea of self).
Of course, consciousness is an umbrella term for all sorts of things. I wouldn’t, for example, be inclined to the view that turtles have conscious intentions or purpose in swimming to the beach to lay their eggs (though I am happy to be disabused of that provisional conclusion), and that is why I liked your statement.
Ciao for now,
David
David Mills
June 27, 2012 at 8:38 am
Jim,
Afterthought (I am prone to these):
My use of the word ‘agency’ in my previous post is obviously up for grabs, discussion-wise.
I can imagine/conceive/allow the possibility of internal agency, and your analogy with quantum/macro realities is useful. All I can say is that I do not tend to lean this way (or am leant this way, ha ha, the possibilities are multiple).
As you probably know, there have been a number of potentially illuminating experiments, notably Libet et al which I referred to previously, which tend to suggest that we may make decisions instinctively (that is to say like a ‘lower’ animal) and then post-rationalize them. This may involve the brain cortex, among other things.
Another interesting set of experiments, as you may know, are the ‘split brain’ ones, where the two hemispheres of the brain are disconnected, at least at the cortex connections (though not deeper), the subjects of the experiments having had this procedure done previously, in order, if I recall correctly, to alleviate symptoms of epilepsy.
The upshot appears to be that the mind, when it cannot compute an explanation, is able to confabulate one, which may, in a way, be similar to post-rationalization.
Regarding outside agency, I am even more disinclined to believe in it, for lack of good evidence or reason to do so.
Here’s a $64,000 question for you. One that you’ve heard before, I’m sure. If consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain/body, how come it is altered by lesion and/or anaesthetic?
I am sure, like me, you may have heard the possible answers, including the ‘radio receiver’ possibility. Personally, I have explored these, and not been convinced.
David
Steersman
July 5, 2012 at 4:53 pm
David,
I have been spending too much (enjoyable) time on our conversation already …
Likewise, on both accounts. :-)
But since Dr. Hoffmann is providing us both with some prime soap-box space – whether because he is gratifyingly tolerant or simply amused or has some interest in gauging the pulse of some segment of the blogosphere (0.00005 steradians) – I figure it would be somewhat boorish, at least, to not take advantage of the opportunity. :-)
Of course, consciousness is an umbrella term for all sorts of things.
It is indeed. The following was quoted in the philosopher David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory which I think adequately and amusingly summarizes the problem or its apparent intractability:
The International Dictionary of Psychology does not even try to give a straightforward characterization:
Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness – to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (Sutherland 1989) [pg 3]
Personally, I think that it is something that “goes all the way down”; that several of the better models for the phenomenon are panentheism and, more explicitly from “Eastern religions”, Indra’s Net – which shows some interesting similarities with holograms; and that, as suggested both by Dawkins’ TGD discussion of Julian Jayne’s theories and by Chalmer’s ruminations on the topic, consciousness and “God” are intricately and fundamentally interrelated – if not as actualities then as “phenomena”.
… though I am happy to be disabused of that provisional conclusion.
In which case you might be interested in this 2009 article in Discover magazine on the use of quantum level processing in green sulfur bacteria. As you may know several well known physicists (Tegmark, Stenger), at one time or another, swore up and down that there was no way on god’s green earth that quantum coherence could take place in biochemical structures – a core feature of theories about quantum mechanics being the central and operative principle in the processes of consciousness.
But the article also argues, at least as far as I’m able to decipher and re-phrase it, that the photosynthesis in the bacteria is more than 95% efficient because it uses quantum coherence and “quantum random walk processing” to “calculate” – in zero time, apparently – the most efficient path for the light energy to travel. Now, while most of quantum mechanics is quite a bit outside my salary range and while I don’t want to overindulge in “quantum flapdoodle” and “quantum mysticism”, that still suggests to me, and others, that the bacterium is essentially evaluating and choosing among various possible future courses of events to determine which step is going to be optimal for its survival.
And if that is the case, that such processing is intrinsic to the phenomena of choice and consciousness, then “turtles all the way down” – and all the way up – seems not all that implausible. Don’t know if you’ve run across this bit of cosmological lore, but apparently with the way the current universe was “designed” if the values of the various constants [masses, coupling constants, etc] had been infinitesimally different then stars would have never formed nor would the heavier elements on which life – and consciousness – is so dependent – apparently. Really all hangs together in some surprisingly intricate and fascinating ways – sort of like “Bucky balls” ….
Will try to address your related “afterthoughts” on agency and the other $64,000 question a little later after some further sacrifices to Mammon …. :-)
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 6:02 am
Jim,
You said:
‘Now, while most of quantum mechanics is quite a bit outside my salary range and while I don’t want to overindulge in “quantum flapdoodle” and “quantum mysticism”, that still suggests to me, and others, that the bacterium is essentially evaluating and choosing among various possible future courses of events to determine which step is going to be optimal for its survival. ‘
With all due respect (which you know I have for you), I think ‘quantum flapdoodle/mysticism’ is, er, exactly what you are indulging in. :)
I see nothing there, or in the articles, to suggest anything is ‘evaluating and choosing’. It is like saying that a river evaluates and chooses its path to the sea. (btw I am aware that this is a macro world analogy and of the limitations). now, maybe it (the river) does. Maybe the particles within the river do, at some quantum level. But I don’t seee any reason whatosever to think it likely.
In broad terms, taking on board joseph’s recent comments above, I sense a commonality between you and he and steph, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a reluctance to consider that meaninglessness (in the absolute sense) is (a) parsimonious and (b) not an unbegnign concept for humans to realise. in this sense, intellectually speaking, I’m afraid to say that it seems to me there is a bit too much ‘retreating into the bunker’, and in the case of Joseph and Steph, much lamenting, and caricaturing of those outside, who it may be argued are more willing to bravely breathe the new air . :)
Steersman
July 8, 2012 at 5:09 pm
David,
With all due respect (which you know I have for you) …
Likewise. :-)
… I think ‘quantum flapdoodle/mysticism’ is, er, exactly what you are indulging in.
But no problemo – I’m not so heavily invested in the concept or perspective that I’m unable to recognize or give due consideration to its limitations or criticisms of it – part of the reason I used “overindulge”: moderation in all things (including moderation). However, at the same time, I think that it – quantum mechanics – provides a useful framework for trying to understand if not replicate the phenomenon of consciousness.
But several of the crucial elements of consciousness that QM seems to provide a useful handle on is the phenomenon of choice and the related one of teleology – a useful definition of which is “future requirements dictate current actions”, all of which are encapsulated in the game of chess (among others) and the aphorism “if we wish to have bread on the table tomorrow then we must plant wheat today”. It seems to me that knowing of and choosing between various courses of action is, in that fact itself, a case, virtually at least, of a “cause [bread on the table tomorrow] subsequent in time to a given effect [planting wheat today]” – as Norbert Wiener and others put it in their Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology.
Now, how it is that we know of – are conscious of – those possibilities and are able to choose between them and how they influence that choice is, I think, all tangled up in questions on the nature of causality and on the intricacies of QM itself, all of which I have the barest handle on. But it seems quite evident that we – as semi-autonomous biological entities – are “purpose driven” and goal-directed choosers of our own futures – to whatever limited extent circumstances allow. In addition, it seems that that process of choice – the “evaluating and choosing” – is enhanced if not underwritten by various quantum level processes, notably the projective and anticipatory capabilities provided by the quantum random-walk calculations referenced in that Discover article. And, finally, that perspective seems to have more than a little support from individuals such as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, both of whom generally argue that consciousness is a rather ubiquitous phenomenon, albeit of limited extent in different organisms, that has played a substantial role in the evolution of life:
One possible advantage of consciousness for natural selection is the ability to make choices. As Margulis and Sagan (1995) observe (echoing similar, earlier thoughts by Erwin Schrödinger), “If we grant our ancestors even a tiny fraction of the free will, consciousness, and culture we humans experience, the increase in [life's] complexity on Earth over the last several thousand million years becomes easier to explain: life is the product not only of blind physical forces but also of selection in the sense that organisms choose. . .” (Scott, 1996).
However, to what extent that is different from, as you suggest, “a river choosing its path to the sea”, I certainly don’t know. But it seems related to the question of “What is Life?” – the title of a book by Schrödinger – which appears to be anything but settled, although “self-replication” seems to be a commonly suggested criterion.
I sense a commonality between you and he and steph, which is, a reluctance to consider that meaninglessness (in the absolute sense) is (a) parsimonious and (b) not an un-benign concept for humans to realize.
Probably, at least to the extent that I think that “meaning” itself is an important and useful if not necessary concept. Although I expect my commitment to religion is quite a bit less than theirs. But while your “in the absolute sense” is somewhat of a problematic if not intractable aspect, I would say that it is likely that even you, and many atheists and secular humanists in general, still derive a sense of meaning and purpose from raising your kids and passing the torch and promoting the “Enlightenment” in one way or another; “meaning” is, I think, more or less built into the hardware.
… much lamenting, and caricaturing of those outside, who it may be argued are more willing to bravely breathe the new air
:-) A “nice” method or point of contradistinction with which I can sympathize, although one might argue, with all due respect, that that, at least absent its jesting tone, might be shading a little too much over into hyperbole at best and an over indulgence in a bit of self-flattery at worst. For one thing and relative to your previous “meaningless (in the absolute sense)”, I sort of get the image – which seems to be suggested by many atheists, but which I can also actually sympathize with – of some prototypical “New Wo/Man” bravely accepting the ultimate meaninglessness of life and soldiering on in spite of that. However, in the absence of proof and evidence – which seems to be the case – that seems rather like an article of faith. Which, in the light of the ubiquitousness of both “meaning” and transcendence in general, seems somewhat of an untenable position.
In addition, while I can also sympathize with and actually promote the efforts of atheism to “clear the air” of the noxious fumes generated by religion in general, the question remains, I think, of where we go after that, of what vision atheism itself offers beyond that point. Don’t know if you’ve ever read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or not, but it seems to me that his “vision” of the Eloi and the Morlocks is not far removed from a reasonable extrapolation of what atheism in general has in mind – one might at least hope that Mankind is able to “transcend” that fate.
davidjohnmills
July 8, 2012 at 6:20 pm
Jim,
You said:
‘…… the question remains, I think, of where we go after that, of what vision atheism itself offers beyond that point. Don’t know if you’ve ever read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or not, but it seems to me that his “vision” of the Eloi and the Morlocks is not far removed from a reasonable extrapolation of what atheism in general has in mind – one might at least hope that Mankind is able to “transcend” that fate…..’
I fully understand that to those of a ‘spiritual’ or religious persuasion, atheism is scary, and seems cold, lifeless, reductionist and…whatever. I just don’t think it really is. Personally, I find it quite the opposite. Quite liberating, mysterious and exciting, as if new doors are opened, rather than any being closed off. Not sure why you think Eloi and Morlocks are more likely in an atheist world than a religious one.
Steersman
July 9, 2012 at 2:28 pm
David,
I fully understand that to those of a ‘spiritual’ or religious persuasion, atheism is scary, and seems cold, lifeless, reductionist and…whatever.
I certainly don’t find it at all scary; just somewhat incomplete. Emergence and its “companion” transcendence seem to manifest themselves in far too many other spheres to not think that they might have some relevance to the phenomenon of “God” – even if I think that traditional religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones, have gone badly off the rails in their use of it (I’ve seen junkies – of the literal sort – act with more integrity and decorum).
Not sure why you think Eloi and Morlocks are more likely in an atheist world than a religious one.
Assessing probabilities, particularly for hypotheticals, is (almost) always problematic, but I would say that, based on historical data, the “religious world” is just as prone to the “them vs. us” – the Eloi vs. The Morlocks – as an atheist / secular humanist one. Just that the former at least has, I think, somewhat of a redeeming feature in the form of some transcendent vision of one sort or another. Communism, at least the Russian version from the little I know, also had one of those, although I think its “fatal flaw” lay in not looking far enough ahead – and in trying to fit its understanding of human nature to its dogma rather than vice versa.
But somewhat apropos of the point, you might be interested in this post from the Butterflies & Wheels blog (part of the Freethought “ghetto”, an epithet that has some justification) – Steph can go directly to the blog it links to – on the topic of fundamentalist Christianity’s aversion to critical thinking. This is a portion of the Republican Party’s view based on its decidedly unseemly “cohabitation” – strange bedfellows and all that – with religious fundamentalism:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
P.S. Not to lean on you at all or insist on a particular format but you might be interested in this site which has some HTML formatting codes. The New Oxonian seems only to support bold, italics and http links – no blockquotes – but even that helps I think.
davidjohnmills
July 10, 2012 at 2:54 am
Jim,
You said,
‘……but I would say that, based on historical data, the “religious world” is just as prone to the “them vs. us” – the Eloi vs. The Morlocks – as an atheist / secular humanist one. Just that the former at least has, I think, somewhat of a redeeming feature in the form of some transcendent vision of one sort or another…..’
…which last part seems, to me, to be something which you have mentioned quite a few times.
Hm. Do people ‘need’ a vision? I could argue that they don’t, necessarily, but I think that might muddy the waters, since it’s entirely debateable how far I could take that. Let’s just say I agree, for the purposes of the discussion, that they (we) do.
Does atheism lack a vision? Is it a bit like a political satirist. You know the sort, the one who prompt you (or at least me, repeatedly) to say to yourself, ‘yeah, very witty, mate, very pithy, but hey, why don’t you try to run the country, mate, if you think you could do a better job, eh?’. :)
I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times though, that atheism is not an ideology, no matter how much it seems like one to non-atheists. Atheism is only an ideology, I once read, if not collecting stamps can be described as a hobby. :)
So, here’s the deal. If you’re an atheist, and your thing is social justice and the like, you are an atheist who has a vision of social justice. Ditto for an atheist who ‘digs’ humanism, or evironmental issues, or animal welfare, or gender equality, or…..well you get the point. I’m sure, as I said, that you’ve heard it a thousand times. I just thought it worth pointing out again.
davidjohnmills
July 10, 2012 at 4:28 am
Jim,
There is more to it than that (above) obviously, but that’s the core. As Clinton (George not Bill) might have said, ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’. :)
But it would, for example, be a bit disingenuous of me to suggest that atheism (to temporarlily use a general label) is without ‘agenda’. And yes, that agenda is, by and large, er, subtractive (prefer this to ‘negative’ since it’s not the same thing. I suppose you could say that by and large, atheists would prefer a world sans religion, or at least a world where religion has no more status than say, homeopathy or ‘crystal healing’, that is to say, where people are free to believe in it if they want to, and gain benefits thereof, but we don’t have crystal healing informing decisions about education or politics, or at least not because of the tenets of crystal healing.
Which leads on to the question, ‘do we/people need religion?’
(specifically using the definition which involves a god or the supernatural).
Personally, I would say, demonstrably, no. I don’t appear to, and I know many others who don’t either, and some of ‘em are in wheelchairs, or poor, or suffering from depression (by mentioning which in passing I only mean to clarify that I’m aware that there are pitfalls with ‘I’m all right Jack’ comfortable armchair atheism). Furthermore, the countries I admire the most (if I ever lapse into admiring whole countries) are, at least in some ways, the Northern European, Scandinavian ones, which have not descended into chaos (quite the reverse) as a result of waning religion.
Which reminds me, I believe Jean Sibelius once said that other composers (I think he may have had Gustav Mahler partly in mind) make cocktails, where he offered only a glass of cold, clear spring water. Not sure I agree that in hindsight this describes his music (minimalism arrived in force slightly later, in all art forms) but I like the idea.
So, the question, in a way, becomes, ‘do we/people need cordial?’ :)
Of course, W C Fields once famously remarked (when offered something to dilute his whisky), ‘water?….never touch the stuff…..fish have sex in it’. But that is a different matter, sort of, though not entirely, because you can do a lot of things in and with water, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily ‘lacking’ anything, which is why I preferred ‘subtractive’ to ‘negative’.
Steersman
July 10, 2012 at 3:13 pm
David,
I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times though, that atheism is not an ideology ….
Don’t think I’ve heard it phrased quite that way, but I’ve heard and had to deal with it as “atheism as a religion”. And likewise the analogy to collecting stamps. But in that sense I think there is some justification – as I have argued here in this thread – for considering atheism as a religion, at least metaphorically speaking in the sense of a “cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion”.
But I also point out with some acerbity if not rudeness – which, you won’t be surprised to learn, tends not to be received by the religious all that well – that some principles have quite a bit more credibility and utility than others.
So, here’s the deal. If you’re an atheist, and your thing is social justice and the like, you are an atheist who has a vision of social justice. … heard it a thousand times. I just thought it worth pointing out again.
No problemo – good fences and good neighbors and all that. :-)
And with which I quite agree – although I guess I’ll have to update my self-identifying label for various conferences and blogs: skeptical agnostic atheistic panentheistic mythopoeic secular humanist …. ;-)
‘free your mind and your ass will follow’.
I like it J.B., I like it. :-)
I suppose you could say that by and large, atheists would prefer a world sans religion ….
Yes, and that is something with which I largely agree – at least qualified by the perspective that “religion” is a bit of a moving target or a somewhat amorphous one. While I am quite sympathetic to Joseph’s championing of some of the positive contributions that some of the religious have made in “our long, tortured, uphill climb toward civilization”, I view with a bit of a skeptical if not a jaundiced eye his apparent willingness to use that to justify letting “the divine foot in the door”. Far better, I think, to “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” – although sometimes in throwing out the bathwater, and the (literalist) monster, it’s not always easy to see where they end and the baby begins.
Which leads on to the question, ‘do we/people need religion?’
Good question. And one good question deserves another, to wit, “what do you mean by religion?” Some people apparently need – having been egregiously and shamefully addicted to it during childhood – the supernatural variety. But I think many more of us, if not all of us, still need various “causes, principles or activities” that we “pursue with some degree of zeal or conscientious devotion” whether that provides or entails some “transcendent” vision or not. Some famous philosopher, I think, said something to the effect that “our monomanias [our causes] can drive us like clockwork” – the trick, I think, is to view them with some circumspection and to retain some degree of control over their directions and manifestations.
Of course, W C Fields once famously remarked …
Gotta love him; everyone’s (?) favorite curmudgeon. I like his related observation about water that even a stick becomes crooked when (partially) immersed in it (whiskey maybe less so depending on the index of refraction). And that more people have been driven insane by religious hysteria than by alcohol….
davidjohnmills
July 11, 2012 at 6:19 am
Jim,
” ‘Which leads on to the question, ‘do we/people need religion?’
Good question. And one good question deserves another, to wit, “what do you mean by religion?” ”
The supernatural kind. Sorry, I thought I’d specified.
‘Some people apparently need – having been egregiously and shamefully addicted to it during childhood – the supernatural variety. But I think many more of us, if not all of us, still need various “causes, principles or activities” that we “pursue with some degree of zeal or conscientious devotion” whether that provides or entails some “transcendent” vision or not.’
This is the point I was trying to explore.
You ‘dig’ the search for the transcendant. I get that, and I’m happy for you. If the world was entirely made up of people like you, I have no doubt it would be a ‘better’ place, and probably not just for homo sapiens. :)
Yes, it’s probably generally true that all of us ‘need’ “various “causes, principles or activities” that we “pursue with some degree of zeal or conscientious devotion” “.
For some of us, ‘transcendant’ is not a big issue, though it could be said that even then, we may be, psychologically, trying to transcend the mere facts of human existence on the mortal coil (cut, momentarily, back to that guy in the cartoon, on the beach, asking ‘what’s it all about?’).
On the other hand, I offer you this, what could be more transcendant than opening the door to, say, atheism, materialism and overall meaninglessness, and exploring where than door takes us?
Personally, I do not fear for the collapse of humanity or civilization, as many others seem to (not you specifically) because, at times, I wonder if in fact the reverse is not a possibility.
Now, please bear in mind that I speak only for myself. I do not have a vision for humanity. Not that I don’t like humanity or the peole of it (I do), but..well, thank goodness all living things do not appear to be capable of voting in a democratic poll as to whether we should be allowed to continue. :)
davidjohnmills
July 11, 2012 at 6:35 am
Jim,
for example,
what if, what we ‘are’ is a machine (in the broadest sense) which has got to the point where we are asking ‘am I a machine’? ‘Am I just a machine, without a progammer, in a meaningless/purposeless (in absolute terms) universe?’
What are the implications of considering the answer to be ‘yes’?
Nihilism?
Possibly, for some.
But in a way, that might be a pity, or if not that then simply ‘not following through’, whether one wants to use the terms ‘brave’ or ‘cowardly’ or not, it’s essentially, it seems to me, an opportunity spurned, for those of us who really are seeking the ‘truth’.
Or are we like Jack Nicholoson’s audience in that film courtroom drama, (‘A Few Good Men’?) when he yells, ‘you want the truth? You can’t HANDLE the truth!’.
I’m not presuming it IS the truth, obviously, just that it seems to me like a better candidate.
And don’t think for a moment that I wouldn’t love there to be a progammer. :)
davidjohnmills
July 11, 2012 at 6:45 am
Jim,
apologies, keep thinking of things.
As you may have gathered, I am not a fan of thinking that atheism/materialism is going to lead to a ‘not better’ outcome. Tend to think of this with more of an open mind. Call me an optimist. In fact, if you like, call me a ‘true humanist’, since it’s arguably disparaging to a species to fear that it can’t cope without what might be a delusion or two. :)
Anyhows, I’m almost sure the Buddhists have been way ‘ahead’ of ‘us’ (‘westerners’) on quite a few fronts, for quite a while.
Steersman
July 11, 2012 at 3:16 pm
David,
The supernatural kind. Sorry, I thought I’d specified.
Somewhat of a rhetorical question. :-)
On the other hand, I offer you this, what could be more transcendent than opening the door to, say, atheism, materialism and overall meaninglessness, and exploring where than door takes us?
My gosh there David! That looks rather like a belief in the “spirit of humanity”, a ‘mythopoeic humanism’! Careful now; you could be painting yourself into Joseph’s and Steph’s corner (which seems unnecessarily restrictive) …. ;-)
Now, please bear in mind that I speak only for myself. I do not have a vision for humanity.
With all due respect and not to put a “label” on you that you don’t want to wear, but it seems to me that you, and Dawkins and company, still have a “vision” of a society or a world sans ‘religion’ – “and no religion too” – that entails or manifests “the greatest good for the greatest number”. That might stop well short of what others might have in mind, but “exploring where that door takes us” still makes it a quite open-ended “vision” – anything but dogmatic.
what if, what we ‘are’ is a machine (in the broadest sense) which has got to the point where we are asking ‘am I a machine’?
As some character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy put it, “Tricky.” :-) Gets down into the details – where the devil resides – of the free-will vs. determinism debate; I think the problem is partly language in general as various words are rather ambiguous and tend to incorporate some contradictory aspects. Sort of like the interpenetrating yin and yang symbol….
And don’t think for a moment that I wouldn’t love there to be a programmer.
Yes, one can certainly sympathize with that perspective. Although I think that in some real and profound sense we are individually and collectively one of those: “masters of our fates; captains of our souls”.
Anyhows, I’m almost sure the Buddhists have been way ‘ahead’ of ‘us’ (‘westerners’) on quite a few fronts, for quite a while.
Yes, quite agree. A major part of our – as ‘westerners’ – problem is, I think, our perspectives on the absolute; as mentioned above, the yin-yang symbol seems to provide a better handle on many phenomena.
davidjohnmills
July 11, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Jim,
Just heading home from work here. On hols for a few days now. The ‘Glorious Twelfth’ don’t cha know. Northern Ireland comes to a standstill, bar the marching feet and the Lambeg drumming.
Just briefly,
A lot of the time, we seem to understand each other. Just occasionally, you seem to completely misunderstand something I’ve said (and likewize ditto in the other direction I’m sure), and when I said this:
‘On the other hand, I offer you this, what could be more transcendent than opening the door to, say, atheism, materialism and overall meaninglessness, and exploring where than door takes us?’
and you said this:
‘My gosh there David! That looks rather like a belief in the “spirit of humanity”, a ‘mythopoeic humanism’! Careful now; you could be painting yourself into Joseph’s and Steph’s corner (which seems unnecessarily restrictive) …. ‘
I struggled to see a meeting of minds.
It’s not that I think it’s transcendant (at least that’s not a word I would use)…I was…using your word, temporarily, or at least ..I wasn’t using it in the sense you seem to think I was using it, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of it for hooman beans-ism, or whatever the correct term is.
I suppose I was trying to suggest that if you, Jim, are seeking what you call the transcendant, have you ever considered exploring where I’m suggesting?
Steersman
July 11, 2012 at 6:20 pm
David,
The ‘Glorious Twelfth’ don’t cha know. Northern Ireland comes to a standstill ….
Interesting. I had been guessing that you were in England – Canada for me. But, as the American biologist Jerry Coyne [Why Evolution Is True] has been discussing the topic periodically, I’m curious about the status of the so-called “Blasphemy Laws” there – although that probably refers more to Ireland itself, with its larger Catholic population, rather than the northern part which I gather is still part of the UK – and Church of England.
A lot of the time, we seem to understand each other. Just occasionally, you seem to completely misunderstand something I’ve said (and likewize ditto in the other direction I’m sure) ….
Yes, quite true I think – part of the necessity for continual feedback, a term fully developed in the science of cybernetics (part of my ‘toolkit’ for putting bread on the table if not for making a claim to fame ….) But that is a problem that bedevils communication of all sorts – noise, channel capacity, entropy, etc. I generally find the Persian, Eastern, parable of the blind men and the elephant to be remarkably relevant and cogent in a great many similar circumstances.
It’s not that I think it’s transcendent (at least that’s not a word I would use)…I was…using your word, temporarily, or at least ..I wasn’t using it in the sense you seem to think I was using it ….
Yes, I think that is the crux of the problem, the different interpretations and meanings of the word – part of the reason why I’ve referenced, I think, the Wikipedia article on the topic several times here. But I think the core attribute that is common to all applications and uses is:
… an object (or a property of an object) [that is] comparatively beyond that of other objects.
And, I would argue, the “group” is “beyond” the “individual” – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – although there are some problematic aspects to that – and in the same way that a whole – consciousness – emerges out of, and is greater than and beyond, the attributes of other objects (neurons in the case of consciousness).
But a fairly prosaic and basic definition yet one that, I think, encompasses the spectrum from the mathematical concept of emergence (phonons being a particularly good example) to the secular or atheistic “the greatest good for the greatest number” to the “spiritual” [Joseph’s and Steph’s “mythopoeic humanism” which is, I think, still well short of the whole ball of wax] to the theistic “God”. And it was that common thread which informed my (jesting) argument that your “atheistic transcendence” put you into the same “corner”, more or less, with Joseph’s & Steph’s “spiritual humanism” variety – all of which, more or less, I also agree with.
But a moot point as to how far up the ladder that concept can be extended, although I expect rather far – certainly much further than we’ve so far managed to push it.
… have you ever considered exploring where I’m suggesting?
But not quite sure what you’re suggesting. If it is the Buddhist and Eastern philosophy then I have already done that – at least to some extent – and it is that which sort of provides, I think, the “glue” which holds those different examples of transcendence together.
davidjohnmills
July 13, 2012 at 4:27 am
Jim,
‘….to the secular or atheistic “the greatest good for the greatest number” ‘…..
Hadn’t thought of that as an atheistic or secular thing, but, there you go. :)
‘….Joseph’s & Steph’s “spiritual humanism” variety – all of which, more or less, I also agree with. ‘
If you mean you agree with them regarding their preferred definition of humanism, then, actually, so do I (agree with them, or at least am sympathetic) to a large extent, as might be obvious. Some atheists do indeed disparage supernaturalist religion a bit too much., or more accurately, disparage those who believe in it.
‘”… have you ever considered exploring where I’m suggesting?”
But not quite sure what you’re suggesting. If it is the Buddhist and Eastern philosophy then I have already done that – at least to some extent – and it is that which sort of provides, I think, the “glue” which holds those different examples of transcendence together……..’
No, not that.
What I was wondering, in passing (it’s not a dare or a challenge and I’m not trying to prove anything, since I’m only an amateur explorer myself), was, have you ever considered exploring the implications of, say, the universe being meaningless and undirected (not to say that there isn’t an ‘animating force’, just that it’s not got any direction or intent, IOW, it’s just an ‘is’, naturalist thing).
IOW, the blind men and the elephant is an excellent story, but, what if…..there’s no elephant, other than the one we’re assuming ‘should’ be there?
davidjohnmills
July 13, 2012 at 4:29 am
Jim,
IOW, it’s a sort of invitation into the atheist/materialist mind, for a while. :)
Steersman
July 13, 2012 at 1:38 pm
David,
Some atheists do indeed disparage supernaturalist religion a bit too much, or more accurately, disparage those who believe in it.
Not sure that it is possible to do that “too much”. :-) It really is, I think, decidedly problematic in many ways and virtually any acceptance of it is tantamount to allowing people to be driving while totally blind. As metaphors and as abstractions – even as the basis of poetry – it has its uses – interestingly even Dawkins makes a “spirited” defense of personification in his book The Selfish Gene from that perspective. But to take them literally is, at least, a logical fallacy of profound dimensions – reification – if not a serious case of idolatry.
If you mean you agree with [Joseph & Steph] regarding their preferred definition of humanism, then, actually, so do I (agree with them, or at least am sympathetic ….
Their “preferred definition” seems to be more “spiritual” than “supernatural”, although I think Steph at least unrealistically and inaccurately discounts the latter’s prevalence and problematic consequences far too much. But the former has, as I will agree with you, some utility and value – interestingly Sam Harris is attempting to “reclaim” the word “spirituality” from some of its negative and problematic connotations as described in some detail on Jerry Coyne’s website. But that is, I think, predicated more on a recognition that some, even many, “feelings” can – not necessary, do – provide more accurate pictures or views of the world that are not readily accessible to (conscious) reason and logic.
… have you ever considered exploring the implications of, say, the universe being meaningless and undirected (not to say that there isn’t an ‘animating force’ …)
Yes, certainly. Although whether it is or is not, is, I think, something that is necessarily an article of faith – not something that is readily, if at all, provable one way or another. In which case, a reasonable question is then which one is going to provide the most benefits – and probably each one has its downsides. But that might be, as you suggest, a reasonable question to pursue …. :-)
As for your “animating force”, I’ve always been somewhat partial to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Universal Will to Become” [UWTB]. :-) But I find it somewhat amusing to note that he had been an honorary president of the American Humanist Association ….
… what if…..there’s no elephant, other than the one we’re assuming ‘should’ be there?
Certainly a fair question. But in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, I would say, as mentioned, that it is simply an article of faith that people should be entitled to pursue in virtually any way they wish – although any that rely heavily on supernatural events and causations should, I think, be heavily discounted and deprecated. As Carl Sagan put it:
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. [Broca’s Brain; pg xii]
davidjohnmills
July 14, 2012 at 4:32 am
Jim,
‘Their “preferred definition” seems to be more “spiritual” than “supernatural”, although I think Steph at least unrealistically and inaccurately discounts the latter’s prevalence and problematic consequences far too much. But the former has, as I will agree with you, some utility and value – interestingly Sam Harris is attempting to “reclaim” the word “spirituality” from some of its negative and problematic connotations as described in some detail on Jerry Coyne’s website. But that is, I think, predicated more on a recognition that some, even many, “feelings” can – not necessary, do – provide more accurate pictures or views of the world that are not readily accessible to (conscious) reason and logic.’
IOW, the suggestion that atheists, even the ‘new’ variety, are out to suppress the spritual, is, er, a canard. And if it’s that, what is the whole schmozzle about disqualifying atheists from humanism REALLY about?
To me, it’s about people who don’t want to let go of he supernatural, or the possibility of it, having their noses put out of joint by those who are prepared to let go of it, and embrace what humanism is (arguably, IMO) about, namely, just humans. :)
Of course, Monty Python have been there already, as ever. ‘Are you the People’s Front of Judea?’ ‘Bog off mate, they’re a bunch of splitters. We’re the Judean People’s Front!’ Lol.
I’m sure another humanist denomination (non-atheist humanism, agnostic humanism, whatever) will hardly rock the boat. Heck, there ae over 39,000 denominations of Christianity, and that boat’s still floating. :)
Dan Tivis
July 1, 2012 at 8:34 am
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your weblog and wished to say that I’ve really enjoyed surfing around your blog posts. After all I will be subscribing to your rss feed and I hope you write again soon!
Reply
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
The New Oxonian
Books etc.
Comments and Moderation
Vita Brevis
..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)
by rjosephhoffmann
Reblogged from The New Oxonian:
Click to visit the original postClick to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
Click to visit the original post
by admin Posted on January 1, 2012
UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
The Missouri boy in Connecticut
HO remembers their…
Read more… 3,935 more words
Published: June 20, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
..
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
The New Oxonian
Books etc.
Comments and Moderation
Vita Brevis
..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on January 1, 2012
UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
The Missouri boy in Connecticut
HO remembers their Huckleberry Finn? In chapter 19, Huck, Tom and Jim, afloat on the Mississippi River, meet up with two grifters, the Duke and the Dauphin, who claim to be exiled European royalty.
Their scam is going from town to town performing makeshift “scenes” from Shakespeare’s plays, then escaping with their lives when the rube public hear declamations like this:
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
After spending a few hours with the scoundrels, Huck reflects,
It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.
But (in one of the great mysteries of the book) Huck continues to aid and abet, pastes their playbills on buildings in towns along the river, enjoys swapping tales with them on the raft, and even saves their skin when they have a close shave.
The Duke and the Dauphin are Mark Twain’s contribution to a a literary stereotype that goes back to plays like Our American Cousin (an English drama of 1858) that pit a pampered and brainless British aristocracy against the dull, stammering but basically honest Yankee (Lord Dundreary and Asa Trenchard, respectively, in the play): Americans are naive, optimistic, uncultured, energetic and gullible; the British are cunning, cynical, indolent and intellectually dissipated. America is a good place to make a buck by selling wares that His Majesty’s subjects either can’t afford or simply don’t have much use for.
Edward Sothern as Lord Dundreary
Things like atheism. I recently cited the statistics for religion in Britain. If you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is not an encouraging thing to note that only about 36% of Britons claim to be religious and a higher number claim not to believe in God.
Compare these to statistics for atheism in America. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009, found that 34.2 million Americans (15.0%) claim no religion (“nones”), of which only 1.6% explicitly describes itself as atheist (0.7%) or agnostic (0.9%). If you are an atheist-front organization, also not an encouraging picture, no matter how you fiddle the stats to make “No religious preference” or “Sorry, really in a hurry” survey-takers into atheists. Nones further have to be adjusted for mothers whose safety clasp just failed on their child-seat doing a drive-by after school pickup, and shoppers standing in line at the exchange counter on December 26th.
If I were an atheist strategy specialist there is at least one biblical story I would need to believe was literally true: the saga of David and Goliath. I’d want to know how a very little movement can bring down a cultural behemoth like American religion by throwing a few stones.
The part nobody remembers
This led me to reflect on how the new atheism arrived in America and who is in charge of pasting the playbills on the storefronts.
OT to deny the contribution of several authors to the “movement”–Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens–I think it’s safe to say that the style of the new atheism extrudes from the work of Richard Dawkins. The paradigmatic shift from detente to full scale assault against religion as an undifferentiated mass of human error and superstitious thinking belongs to him: Why should we live with ideas that we find absurd and repugnant, or indulge people who fantasize the truth of their beliefs into norms that other people ought to follow? Gloves off, me hearties: Error should be resisted, countered, argued against, corrected, defeated–not coddled.
And what is the truth? Science is the truth.
The God Delusion (2006) and the wave of comment it created is now yesterday’s news. To remind myself of how I felt in 2006 while reading it, I talked myself (under the influence of several spirituous incentives) into re-reading it, and, much to my surprise, I liked it better the second time around–as a book rather than a best selling icon. It was a better book than Daniel Dennett’s really very sloppy Breaking the Spell, which I reviewed soon after it appeared in 2007. But then I forced myself to re-read a few of the reviews I had archived over the past several years, and this one by Murrough O’Brien from The Independent flagged itself. Just after pointing out Dawkins’s abuse of Bertrand Russell’s famous “Teapot Argument,” O’Brien notes.
Some of [Dawkins's] arguments are old atheistic chestnuts, and how merrily they crack in the roasting pan. The palm for outrageous question-begging goes to the Who Made God “argument”. Dawkins squirts this sachet of puerile pap (most of us had outgrown it before hitting double figures) over the whole book, to inadvertently comic effect. He writes: “The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” The short response to that is a simple “Why?” The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?”only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?
But then the real punch, trilitorally speaking, of The God Delusion was panache. Dawkins was an extrovert and spellbinder compared to Dennett, with his Darwinesque looks, and the singularly incoherent Harris, whose work Scott Atran, a serious researcher and cognitivist, called playacting at science and politically pernicious while also getting basic anthropological theories backwards, like his famous wowser concerning the work of Franz Boas.
Dennett
The real success story of the new atheism is that it was bought and sold after being intellectually panned by almost all the cognoscenti who weren’t atheist activists. In fact, as the circle closed around a tightly knit cadre of God-opposers, opposing God became virtually the sole criterion for what, in their parochial view, counted for anthropology, archaeology, sociology and the study of religion–about which all of the four (check the footnotes) were blissfully ignorant.
And I mean that in the most damning sense. Virtually all of the credible reviews alleged it of Dawkins, and the others didn’t fare much better outside the atheist camp. The reflexive answer was to accuse anyone who opposed the unscientific, malformed, and totally ignorant premises of these books of being “faitheists” and to say that dispute would be treated as treason against the higher purposes for which the books had been written.
If that didn’t stick, sane voices were denounced as jealous voices, as though reputable scholars wished they had written historical and philosophical travesty under their own names.
The repetitive accusation against Dawkins–that he was attacking a straw man, a sort of tertia res religiosa that did not exist–became the new framing device for every critique of new atheist tactics: its critics (despite manifold evidence to the contrary) were attacking a form of atheism that did not exist. Sensible, if complex views like those of John Gray on the origin of humanitarian impulses, were conveniently set aside in favour of a new recipe for a scientific-evolutionary morality that floats above historical causality: Wrote Atran,
There is an irony of history that completely escapes Harris and other new atheists in their evangelical quest for a global morality rooted in scientific truth. As philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics convincingly argues, it is universal forms of monotheism, such as Christianity and Islam, that merged Hebrew tribal belief in one God with Greek faith in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation that originated the inclusive concept of Humanity in the first place….Harris’s own messianic moral absolutism, based on devotion to “truth,” leads to some rather nutty proposals that defy common sense and are justified by made-up history that is patently untrue.
So much for Harris’s pop-psychology, or rather MRI-enhanced pop-psychology. Dawkins and Dennett were serious academics working out-of-field but who seem honestly to have believed that the methodologies developed in other disciplines were easily mastered and just as easily dismissed–a cavalier attitude toward critique that bordered on Dominican hubris at best and anti-intellectualism at the deep end.
Hitch
Always guided by the nature of the game, Hitchens, the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group, was in it for the ride. All four looked as though they had powered their way through their task by reading the Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and in some cases not even those carefully enough.
From any objective reading of the serious reviews, their mission to God’s kingdom was an epic fail in terms of what they brought home from the journey. It was all finished, critically speaking, in 2006 when Terry Eagleton said,
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?
Dawkins’s precedence in ignoring the opposition by denying they constituted serious opposition became a trademark of the movement he put into place. But despite the discounted value of the books as credible intellectual proposals, there were plenty of people prepared to spread the mission stateside, where Dawkins’s accent, his unabashed science-thumping and his wares were more valuable than in Blighty, where people had been giving up on God (in droves) for decades without his help.
What hath anti-God wrought: The new atheism, which was really an American phenomenon, like Spam.
One can’t simply blame Richard Dawkins for creating the kind of poster-pasters his leadership had produced in Gotchaland. He didn’t ordain them, exactly. That would be like blaming Jesus for founding the church. Is a rock star guilty of the excesses of his fans? Of course not.
But it is undeniable that new atheism would never have congealed, to the extent it ever congealed, if American neo-Darwinist soldiers and a few strays hadn’t taken on the fight. Dawkins, as Garry Wolff commented in 2006, was very old news in England when he decided to try plowing the fundamentalist pastures of America. And soldiers there were, just waiting for the right fight and marching orders. And a good thing too: Dawkins himself came off relatively unsullied by these battles, while his American promoters didn’t mind a little mud.
Headlights:
Coyne
Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a biology professor at Chicago. His only book, Why Evolution is True (2009), is his contribution to the anti-intelligent design debate and carries endorsements from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker and others in the atheist-neo-Darwinist klatch. Dawkins reviewed the book for Atheist News in 2009. Hardly anyone would fault Coyne for his attempts to combat the anti-evolution fever that grips the establishment that is failed American science education. I for one think Jerry Coyne has struck a blow for rationality and common sense by writing this lucid book. It’s a shame therefore that Coyne buys into the Dawkins incompatibility model that makes religion the sworn enemy of science and science the salvation of the race. It is frankly embarassing, after two hundred years of the scientific study of religion, to hear a scientist saying things like this:
In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.
Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion? And some information: the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the most venerable in the nation–after which the Chicago School of Religionswissenschaft got its name (and turned Europeans green with envy at its methods)–one notably lacking in Irish elves–is located at 1025 E. 58th Street. Any number of evolution-accepting scholars–including Martin Riesebrodt would be happy to have a chat and set you straight. Of course, if you really believe that a degree in biology trumps every other discipline, then why bother?
P Z Myers. Winner of the 2009 “Humanist of the Year Award,” a lapse of judgement for which the American Humanist Association will burn like cotton floss in a non-existent hell for their abuse of the word humanist,
Myers
P Z Myers is cut from the same neo-Darwinist fabric as Dr Coyne, but without the credentials. That means he is anti-intelligent design, pro-evolution, and happy to be known as the Don Rickles of the Dawkins theatre troupe. He’s the purveyor of the award-winning science blog Pharyngula where he specializes in calling people who don’t agree with him stupid and moronic.
To his credit, Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit though if his rep holds up as the sun goes down on new atheism he does have a collection of his favourite anecdotes and outrages coming out in 2012. But this does not stop him from being the voice to which most of the young neo-atheists pay heed. I was reminded last year, after being told by P Z that I needed to be more respectful to the cause, that he deserves to be called Dr Myers. I had asked why someone who teaches in a university could not distinguish between free speech and inciteful behaviour–like that associated with Koran-burning Florida yahoo Terry Jones.
Myers, who describes himself as a moral nihilist, writes like this:
There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. Webster Cook smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. This isn’t the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. …. It is just a cracker! So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls.
So, God love him, P Z Myers got the chance to kick the pope in the balls by spearing a consecrated host (eucharist is the name of the sacrament you fucking ex-Lutheran moron–whoops, just resorting to idiom) and a few other factotums. For this he is famous. And humanist of the year.
But let me just say this about the evolutionary, neo-Darwinist, religion sucks, anti-intelligent design phalanx of new atheism: If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger. If there were ever an occasion for a serious scholar like Dawkins to say, this is over the top, P Z Myers is that opportunity. So far–nothing. The clowns are now the whole circus.
Greta Christina
Greta Christina. I’m not sure whether Greta is a headlight, because there can only be two and she will see any reference to three as some sort of weird sexual joke. That’s the problem. She sees everything as a weird sexual joke. Ranked as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers, Christina exemplifies in her work the increasing influence of LGBTQ trend toward identifying atheism and humanism with victimization and social marginalization. She can be amusing, but needs to take on some serious issues, such as why radical feminism and lesbianism are often perceived to be anti science when new atheism is purely devoted to an evolutionary model that, frankly, is not friendly to special pleading for biological exceptionalism based on sex. Didn’t understand that sentence? You need to.
Sidelights.
Mark Twain just needed Huck and Tom to paste the handbills to the walls. Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.
Ophelia Benson, host of Butterflies and Wheels, has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen. I still regard her as a fair-broker who needs to rise above the temptation to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the grousers who loiter around her kitchen table. I mean campfire.
The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of the Hemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…
Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician qua neo-Darwinian atheist who teaches at James Madison University in Virginia. Rosenhouse [sic] essentially does book reviews of things that cross his path and passes judgment on what he doesn’t like, usually anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism. Of Rabbi Alan Lurie’s recent HuffPo piece on religion, Rosenhouse opined,
We’re really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I’m not sure what he means by ‘the histories,’ but I find nothing to admire in the remaining items on his list. I am not only unimpressed by the world’s various alleged holy texts, but I frankly dislike the whole idea of a holy text. Most religious rituals and practices leave me beyond cold, I think the world’s ‘mystical teachings’ should be discarded in toto, and I think better uses could be found for sacred spaces.
To which I say…Go on. Suggest already. KFCs, meth clinics, museums, failing public libraries, Starbuck’s. You choose. America, as we know, is awash in sacred spaces so the fewer of these antiquities the better. Let’s use the real estate for what we really hold sacred. I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating? Can’t he do this on Facebook and get a thousand likes to boot?
S0 many other poster-pasters, but time is up and I hope my case is made.
The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty-first century England.
HERE is a final question. Why does this matter? Why, more specifically, does it matter to me–why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all? –So what if the ranters are ranters, that they pay no attention to serious religious studies scholarship, ignore the realities of two hundred years of academic inquiry into the foundations of religious thought and dismiss tons of modern scientific investigation into the nature of religious belief as worthless?
Jason Rosenhouse says, presumably with a straight face and clear conscience, he doesn’t know what “scientism” is. Naturally his question, in the ringaround-the-rosey style of this support group, is enthusiastically echoed by Coyne.
Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term (“science”) as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology or physics, for example, have been to their own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.
To deny the authority and validity of specific methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.
Richard Dawkins
The willful ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
In the long run, real science acknowledges failed experiments and the humbling contribution of being wrong as a way of moving toward the right answers. It can’t rest like a medieval pope on its teaching authority. The “scientism” of the new atheists consists in a failed experiment in the misapplication of method. Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that religion is the trivialization of complexities, a default position favoured by “dims” who just don’t get science. The scientistic worldview favoured by his promoters has relied heavily on the trivialization of appropriate methods for understanding religion. Given the starting point of his argument, there can be no other outcome.
The way forward in any useful critique of religion does not depend on activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Eric MacDonald, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, Mark Tawin, new atheism, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, scientism. Bookmark the permalink.
Share this:
Facebook6
Twitter1
Email
StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Print
Like this:
?
Published: January 1, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
..
48 Responses to “Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)”
.
Veronica Abbass
January 1, 2012 at 11:17 am
I want to get my comment in before Steph can say (ad nauseam) how wonderful this post is. I want to be the first to not like this post.
You say, “Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.”
Eric is a Canadian and spells favour the same way you do.
You say “Ophelia Benson . . . has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.”
I know you used to contribute regularly; I read some of the posts you wrote when you were not angry and cynical.
Thank you, you have provided your readers with links to the best atheist websites available.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
January 1, 2012 at 8:48 pm
That Eric MacDonald is a Canadian doesn’t seem worth the bother of changing the sentence to North American. Will “former colonials” do?
Reply
steph
January 1, 2012 at 8:49 pm
You’re so funny Veronica. Yay, congratulations you beat me! Isn’t it ‘wonderful’… I know how that makes you screech and run and tell every other ant all about it. “Everybody knows”: it’s a song. Do you know it?
Mr MacDonald grants Dawkins favours freely too? More fool old Mack, eh?
I wonder what your definition of angry is. This post is witty, yes, and incisive. Accurate as always. The style is no different from previous essays on other websites. Erudite and eternally critical, which is the nature of good academic scholarship. He’s always consistently interesting don’t you think? No? It’s fascinating that when the subjects of a critique are atheists, the subjects angrily growl that it’s ‘angry’ critique. Generally critiques of atheism are described by atheists as either ‘angry’, written by a ‘faitheist’ or even as ‘passively aggressive’ or ‘accommodationist’. How can anyone be ‘angry’ with something that’s destroying itself Veronica? How can anyone be angry with something so small? It’s blindingly obvious the ‘atheism’ in this essay is on the road to oblivion and I can’t imagine how your imagination stretches to Joe being angry unless it’s evidence of your own psychological projection. If only David and Goliath were true … but atheists just ain’t go the right pebbles.
Cynical? Veronica, who is never cynical! What is there not to be cynical about? You say, ‘Thank you, you have provided your readers with links to the best atheist websites available’. Indeed. Isn’t it ironic? The proof is in the pudding as they say. That’s the old cliche.
Fantastic review by Murrough O’Brien. Perfectly visualised and nothing could be more fitting than an old chestnut – and the trusty old teapot…
Reply
Apuleius Platonicus
January 1, 2012 at 3:47 pm
This a great overview of the whole New Atheist phenomenon! I especially agree with your appraisal of Hitchens.
Reply
Dan Gillson
January 1, 2012 at 4:17 pm
I wonder if it is even worth it anymore to criticize “new” atheism; the movement only exists for the unsociable to vent their grievances about religion. As far as I am concerned, they can complain as much as they want as long as they do it at their computers.
Reply
Peter
January 2, 2012 at 9:27 am
As well as all of the other things you got wrong – there is no shortage of apple pie here in England.
Peace and love,
Peter
Reply
steph
January 2, 2012 at 10:48 am
Seems like it’s only apple pies you could pick on though. I’ve been in the UK for several years, but all I see on the menus are pork or steak and kidney. And I’m a fruiterian. Apple pies? Perhaps the English need all their apples to sauce for the pork. I’m sure you know your way around better than me – but they’re not visible here to a foreigner, like they are in America. Everywhere I go there, they’re glaring through cake shop windows, littering the supermarket shelves and billboards paid for by MacDonalds. I’ve even seen someone stuffing one down his throat as he walked alongside me in New Orleans. It was apple – I saw the apple when he opened his mouth to talk… But I don’t like pastry anyway. I have a feeling that they’re out of favour and fashion in the UK as far as pie flavour goes. I did inherit Kate Greenaway’s original “A is for Apple Pie” though. Published in 1900, it fell to bits, was restored by a bookbinder, and later meticulously copied by an artistic aunt. I have the original, as well as the copy which would be difficult to distinguish from the original if it wasn’t for the condition.
And just for fun:
A was an Apple pie;
B bit it;
C cut it;
D dealt it;
E eat it;
F fought for it;
G got it;
H had it;
J joined it;
K kept it;
L longed for it;
M mourned for it;
N nodded at it;
O opened it;
P peeped in it;
Q quartered it;
R ran for it;
S stole it;
T took it;
V viewed it;
W wanted it;
X, Y, Z, and all wish’d for a piece in hand.
Famous old rhyme from the nursery. Peace and love and goodwill.
Reply
ken
January 2, 2012 at 9:56 am
I imagine we will always have these issues. C.P. Snow was pontificating on the subject decades ago in his highly influential 1959 Rede lecture “The Two Cultures” which was later published in book form. Snow was bemoaning the rift between the scientific world view and that of the humanities, which is simply an earlier and broader variation of the present day Science/Religion animosity.
How many of the interests and pursuits which enrich our lives but cannot be quantified are supposed to be whittled away because they contribute nothing towards the advancement of science? The arts? Opera? Dance? Degas? Should one stop reading Cervantes because he’s a distraction from Darwin? No weapon in the new atheist’s arsenal will ever convince me of that.
Reply
Snowflake
January 2, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Thankfully, there seem to be approximately zero new atheists who would claim that occupations other than science should be “whittled away”. Religion is not like opera: it actually makes claims about facts and morality which it cannot back up. Opera is ever aware of its status as entertainment (though lovely, sophisticated, etc.).
Reply
ken
January 3, 2012 at 8:56 am
I’ve conversed with these people and they invariably belittle most interests that fall outside the scope of science, unless it happens to be, curiously enough, science fiction.
Apuleius Platonicus
January 4, 2012 at 11:38 am
Snow and “The Two Cultures” are very relevant to this discussion. The one word that most completely describes the New Atheists is “philistines”.
Reply
Apuleius Platonicus
January 4, 2012 at 3:05 pm
And I should have added that Christopher Hitchens was the one New Atheist to whom the “philistine” label did not apply.
Ned
January 2, 2012 at 10:05 am
Great job, and I’m sure you will top it with your 2012 obit for new atheism. I’m looking forward to it!
Reply
dwomble
January 3, 2012 at 2:53 am
Another quote attributed to Twain seem apropos here:
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”
Or perhaps we should consider
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
and just leave it at that.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
January 3, 2012 at 8:40 am
You seem to think I don’t appreciate Mark Twain’s skepticism. I do. I still laugh every time I read ‘The Damned Human Race,” the “War Prayer” and especially “The Mysterious Stranger,” which is one of the most scathing indictments of religious morality ever penned. When I teach freshmen seminars occasionally, Mysterious Stranger is always on the reading list. I don’t have the massive 2010 biography in front of me, but in it he expresses the view that Christianity is a religion of blood and gore and that neither Jesus nor his father would approve of it. But his views on religion were complex, not settled. Do you know his book on St Joan of Arc? And many of his thoughts can only be understood as theological dilemmas of a theodical kind. Let’s be careful of using critical views as broadly atheistic ones, because his weren’t, and he might have been the first to call a PZ Myers a self-promoting huckster.
Gareth Richards
January 2, 2012 at 10:32 am
As Mark Twain said “No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.”
Your jokes are just aren’t as funny as theirs, keep trying.
Reply
steph
January 2, 2012 at 11:04 am
That’s a bit lame. I never liked Mark Twain much anyway. I liked that era of literature generally, but Huckleberry Finn didn’t appeal, and Twain’s ‘jokes’ are all too deliberate and corny. No subtlety. Real wit is a rare but natural quality and appears effortless. The author isn’t ‘trying’ to be funny. He is just dealing with a subject in his naturally articulate and original way. Not to your taste? Maybe you’re being a little ‘trying’ perhaps? Try apple pie.
Reply
Bruce Heerssen
January 2, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Hoffman has rung the death knell of the New Atheism far too early. How easy it is to simply declare victory and walk away from the battlefield, and how foolish. Will he write this piece again next year when the players have so rudely refused to quit the stage?
Coyne is right to pan the idea of “scientism.” Science is the process of rigorously evaluating evidence to arrive at natural truths: that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that populations evolve over time so that one organism can be clearly seen to have been derived from a previous, similar organism. There’s no claim to a higher “truth” such as we see in esoteric ramblings about angels dancing on pins. Nor are there Faustian bargains or Pascalian wagers that sacrifice validity in the service of higher “truths”. There is only relentless examination of evidence and the pursuits thereof, regardless of personal feelings of where that evidence may lead.
For all the tortured and convoluted subtleties of Hume’s and Aquinas’ vaunted theologies, they have failed to justify the basic premise: is it true? The New Atheists (An unfortunate term, as it is not all that new.) apply the scientific method to such claims, and in every case, find them wanting. Before one can pontificate on the nature of angels, one must first establish that angels (or gods) in fact exist. None have been able to do this conclusively and definitively, and it is this point the New Atheists emphasize.
ken
January 2, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I sometimes think parody is the highest form of intelligence, whether it’s directed towards religionists or atheists.
Reply
Wanderer
January 2, 2012 at 10:59 am
Many came out of the atheism closet precisely thanks to the New Atheists.
We need more voices, more variety, not less.
Why should we be afraid of calling something or someone stupid, when it is ?
We are not dealing with 6-years old calling each other names, but grown-up trying to govern the world their way, whatever the means, because their imaginary friend said so.
Thanks to Prof. Dawkins or Dr PZ Myers for using words that everybody can understand.
With Hitchens, Harris, Onfray (french) and all the other “New Atheists”, they have created the next generation of atheists.
Reply
Human Ape
January 2, 2012 at 11:01 am
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope?”
It’s not necessary to be a bullshit expert to be able to identify bullshit.
“Why does this matter? Why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all?”
Many reasons. Here’s three:
ONE: 9/11/2001
Three thousand people had a choice that day. Be burned alive or explode into a red mist when crashing into the pavement below. For what? For the childish cowardly heaven fantasy virtually all theists believe in.
TWO: The never ending Christian war against science education.
Not all Christians are evolution deniers but they all have anti-science fantasies, including the disgusting resurrection of the dead Jeebus, and the magic god fairy every superstitious theist believes in. Even the most moderate Christian belongs to an organization that has a long history of getting in the way of scientific progress. A normal person wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it.
THREE: Religious indoctrination. It’s child abuse and there’s no excuse for it. The child abuse is legal but the brainwashers are no better than terrorists. The only difference is instead of destroying buildings with their flying skills, they destroy the minds of innocent children, making them as permanently stupid as their parents.
By the way, has any theist ever provided evidence for their magical master of the universe? How about evidence for its magic wand? Where has this fairy been hiding the past 14 billion years?
There will never be any evidence for a magical god, an idea no less childish and idiotic than the Easter Bunny fantasy,.
Also, why are theists so terrified of reality? Why don’t they grow up and join the 21st century instead of hiding in the Dark Ages?
Reply
Matt
January 2, 2012 at 11:26 am
“…Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit….”
Dr. Myers is a scientist who focuses on writing primary rather than secondary literature. He has numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, the kind that publish empirical studies rather than reformulated supernatural speculations. You probably know little about what this is like as your field of study only involves thinking about something for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence and never bothering to test its speculations (I won’t even call them hypotheses). Empirical research has an elevated status in scientific literature over books and reviews. In fact, scientists measure their stature in the field largely by the number and influence of their journal publications. How many empirical papers do you have, sir? Myers’ contributions to human knowledge far exceed yours.
By the way, what is up with calling him a “fucking ex-Lutheran?” You had just criticized him for name-calling, and in classic Christian charity turn around and commit the very thing you were criticizing in him.
I used to be a Christian before I realized that Christianity makes empirical predictions about the world (e.g., intercessory prayer works), and that numerous scientific studies show these predictions to be untrue. Other predictions necessary for the classical Christian model include the existence of an immaterial soul, the existence of other disembodied non-material personalities (angels, demons, god), the existence of domains outside the physical universe in which these beings dwell and where the souls of the deceased go, that there is an essential difference between the redeemed and unbelievers, and many other claims for which there is either no evidence or evidence which contradicts these claims. This is a simple issue, and the data clearly exclude the possibility that most of the core Christian claims are true. But theologians and apologists muddy the waters and move the goalposts. They retreat into ever-diversifying revisions of the model until each claim is so detailed that one can get lost and not know which way is up or down. Show me data that the claims I listed above are true and not better explained by a more parsimonious naturalistic hypothesis.
You are wrong to suggest that the New-Atheism is over. A quick look at iTunes will show you that there are more skeptical and atheist podcasts with larger audiences than there are religious podcasts. Christianity is retreating on multiple fronts losing the argument on cultural norms, public policy, and education. Christianity has been forced to evolve in order to adapt to a rapidly changing environment in which its relevance shrinks and its claims sound increasingly ridiculous. In chess, the loser is usually the one who is forced to move in response to their opponent; science and reason have been chasing Christianity all over the board for decades forcing it to change in order to avoid a final check-mate. Let’s talk in 10 or 20 years; my prediction is that atheism will be much more common in America and that traditional forms of Christianity will be less common. We live in a time where people have unprecedented access to data online. The days of the mysterious priesthood with all of the answers is over. Science leads to answers. Christianity leads to pseudo-philosophical musings attempting to resolve conflicts between ancient mythology and the real world. The tyranny of the relgious “academy” is over.
Reply
Adam Lewis
January 2, 2012 at 12:54 pm
I do not understand this vein of criticism that calls the “new atheism” ignorant. It is ignorant. I agree. I consider myself something of a scholar of religion and I do recognize the low-brow nature of the Dawkins-type arguments for atheism.
Yet, these accusations of ignorance coming from supposed serious scholars of religion seem to be ignorant themselves of the general profile of the religious population.
Would Dawkins’ arguments faze a serious theologian or biblical scholar? Hardly. But the average believer is also no serious theologian or biblical scholar. This is factual. Lodes of empirical data testify to this. Jason Slone’s work shows this is true even on a conceptual level.
The “new atheism” is a political movement and as such tries to address the largest section of people. Complaining about their ignorance is like complaining about the ignorance of politicians. It is valid yet futile and ultimately misunderstands the nature of the beast.
I don’t particularly like the “new atheists” either. I personally, as someone learned in religious psychology, find their ignorance sometimes stunning. I’m more in line with Atran’s views.
But it bugs me to no end when I hear your argument advanced without the distinction I outlined here. The new atheists are simply correctly addressing their target audience. Perhaps they can be unsophisticated but so is their intended listener.
Reply
Sam
January 2, 2012 at 1:48 pm
I found this to be a very accurate description of the New Atheists. Very well done. What’s interesting is that none of them seem to have a real passion for science.
Reply
Linda Jean
January 2, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Thank you Sam: for a long time we argue that Dawkins, Harris, Dennett are (were) not scientists sensu stricto (actually not even sesu lato). Dennett claims he is the first experimental philosopher. Dawkins trained in ethology(?) and published really boring original work, Harris has published in the neuroimaging of belief, unbelief and uncertainty. Coyne was well known for releasing large large numbers of fruit flies in point A to fetch them in points B, C, thereof. Of Myers I know he is fond of cephalopods and works with zebra fish: they all share the passion that science will ultimately reveal our true nature (it seems we have none; we are a predetermined collection of molecules devoid of meaning: so, whats the point?)
Reply
Jeff R.
January 2, 2012 at 6:00 pm
This comment is parody, yes?
(Oh golly I hope so)
Otherwise it reads like someone who hasn’t listened to a single word written by Harris, Dennett or Dawkins.
Reply
steph
January 2, 2012 at 6:47 pm
That’s a very bold and unqualified assumption Jeff R. But you’re kidding, “yes?”. You must be. Harrisy, Dawkins and Dennett, hahaha.
Linda Jean
January 3, 2012 at 9:29 am
Parody not in your sense. I could have not listened to their written words, I read them: nothing that has not been said one way or the other long time ago.
Sam
January 3, 2012 at 3:36 pm
They’ve done a nice job of figuring out how to make money by referring to science in their writings. That’s not a passion for science. People with a passion for science are either in the lab or the field.
Jeff
January 3, 2012 at 4:19 pm
“What’s interesting is that none of them seem to have a real passion for science.”
I’m not sure what you base this observation on, but it doesn’t agree with my experience. Most passionate scientists are atheists, by the way. There’s no room left for wishful thinking and superstition once you understand that the Universe is governed by consistent natural laws.
“People with a passion for science are either in the lab or the field.”
People with a passion for religion are either at the pulpit, in a monastery, doing missionary work, or hanging on a cross. So that leaves well over a billion of them that don’t seem to have a real passion for religion.
Rob C
January 2, 2012 at 2:59 pm
If you can’t come up with new ideas, come up with new words. Like Darwinism, scientism is a small-minded attempt to put an “ism” on science.
Sorry, you can create words, but they don’t have to mean anything.
All humanities (humanisms?) do not have a way of knowing beyond the terms and principles agreed to by people who have read a lot of what others have said. Science is distinguished from the humanities way of knowing by having an arbiter of truth-empicial testing and observation. That science is a different and superior way of knowing is seen in the fact that it “works”–humans gain predictive ability and control through it. Philosophy, the basis of most humanities thought, never really produces any useful information. It is sort of a verbal game–a way of talking.
Religion “studies” attempt to mimic philosophy. And, likewise their “way of knowing” is what others have thought long and hard about an concluded without any sort of empirical evidence. Once, however, their ideas enter canon, the ideas assume a mantle of truth that every one else can refer to (as the blog author does in recommending Aquinas, etc.).
Reply
English apple pie lover
January 2, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Well done for debunking that “Who made God?” argument. Oh – no you didn’t, did you? You, like all the “sophisticated” reviewers I have read just say you “outgrew it” or dismissed it as childish. Postulating an all-powerful, intelligent, creator God that needs no explanation to explain something for which we have no explanation is so bogus it is laughable. It is the joke upon which the entire religious house of cards is built and pointing this out is the strongest argument against that world-view. If you have an answer to why it is not, other than vague platitudes, please enlighten us.
Apple pie is very much alive in England – it is definitely my favourite fruit pie!
Reply
Atheist writers respond « Vridar says:
January 2, 2012 at 6:17 pm
[...] against the “New Atheists”. The professor has kicked off the new year with another Re-made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011) and this time some of his targets have [...]
Reply
Red Mann
January 2, 2012 at 8:56 pm
I’m going to jump in here as a complete non-academic. I have no fine degrees in philosophy or theology, not even biology; just an AA in management from over 30 years ago. Just a worker bee programmer. I have to say that Mr. Hoffmann’s treatise is a bit muddled. I’m having a hard time understanding what he is trying to say outside of some intellectual snobbery and a whole raft of ad hominems.
I have read a lot of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne and Eric McDonald. I find them to be very clear in calling religion what it is, belief(s) in imaginary, unsupported entities which makes a great many truth claims. Truth claims which are universally shown to be unfounded. So, yes, religion and science are not especially compatible, and just because some monks transcribed the works of pre-Christian thinkers doesn’t make religion responsible for it’s content any more than a Xerox is responsible for the Shakespeare someone may copy on it.
We Gnu Atheists are accused by our more, apparently, more sophisticated betters because we haven’t read every philosophical argument and digested each and every apologia ever made. I happen to think that PZ’s The Courtier’s Reply, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php, is a wonderful exposé of this intellectual snobbishness. As to Leprechauns, there is just as much evidence for them as for anyone’s god.
Reply
ken
January 3, 2012 at 8:47 am
On the contrary. The Courtier’s Reply is a perfect example of intellectual snobbishness. Basically, it’s an appeal to specialization, which is perfectly understandable as the notion is the product of a thinker steeped and defined by specialization. As I stated earlier, how much of our life enriching experiences should be rejected as irrelevant to the advance of science?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
January 2, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Let me respond briefly to some of what is going on in various strings. It isn’t worth a blog, so find it here and tell ‘em Groucho sent ya..
1. Why is my blog called New Oxonian? Incisive. I was going to call it the New Arkansan but have never set foot in Arkansas. The definition of Oxonian is a graduate of Oxford. Last time I checked I qualified–my doctorate has not been revoked–as do Professors Dawkins, Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, so your quibble is obviously with the word “new.” More important, how does this have anything material to do with the blog? And why isn’t a quick click on the vita brevis tab on the blog enough to give you the basics? Or is this just more ad personam horse doodie?
2. The new atheists don’t oppose the study of religion. Not true: in fact the famous “Pinker Intervention” at Harvard in 2006 prevented religion from becoming a part of Harvard’s core curriculum, on the premise there was no difference between theology and religion-studies, though Harvard was the first university in America to introduce such study in the 1930's, apart from its Divinity School. Read all about it here: http://www.somareview.com/godandmanatharvard.cfm Stephen Pinker (who is far more considerate of religion in general) is not the issue here, btw; a number of the newbies have gone on record as saying that the study of theology does not belong in a university, though in some places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, this would mean closing down their divinity schools where the study of religion is alive and well. That’s half the problem: the other half is that rank amateurs like the newbies have already pronounced their verdict on such study by mixing up the objectives. Frankly if this confusion is any indication of the state of their information, they’d better hold off on the God thing for a few years. If you want to see the nadir of this imbecilic conversation, here you go: http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/06/dawkins-myers-religion-faith
3. Style. I’ll work harder to use shorter sentences and not include so many ideas in a paragraph. I know it is difficult for some readers. In the future I’ll skip the finery and get straight to the insults. If PZ feels he knows me well enough to call me R, I can return the favour my calling him P. Badda Bing.
4. All further questions. Check out the
Atheist Sure Fire Rapid Rapid response Manual for up to the minute information in making a straw man, trolling, the strategic uses of the courtier’s reply, and PAP (the Pomposity Argument Parsed). http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2011/12/01/the-sure-fire-atheist-rapid-response-manual/ It will save you loads of time and save me the trouble of replying to you.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
January 2, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Without getting into the “Gnu” issue first, I’d have to disagree that Hitch is the only true intellectual of the Gnus. I find him a “poseur,” much like the Oscar Wilde he so likes, who has fallen far from his literary height of a century ago and, overall, rightfully so.
If there is an intellectual among the Gnus, even though he recycles himself as he gets older, it’s Dennett if anybody.
That said, on the “science” issue, Harris, above all the others, is guilty of “scientism.” I said so in reviewing his latest book. He’s also guilty of religious hypocrisy himself, when he claimed in “The End of Faith” that Buddhism is “just a psychology.” I’ve wondered ever since then if Harris isn’t a closet Buddhist, to have said such a whopper. (And, if he ever talked to Hitch about Eastern religions.)
At the same time, I think that Mr. Hoffmann sometimes longs for an Enlightenment humanism of 200-plus years ago, and in throwing out the bathwater of “scientism,” he, in things such as cognitive science, etc., throws out too much of the baby of “science.”
MRIs of today may be relatively crude, Mr. Hoffmann, but they’re getting better. The brain as the origin of the mind will be scientifically studied in more detail and accuracy as the years advance.
Reply
Veritas Serum
January 3, 2012 at 9:30 am
To steal a riff from Hillel, ‘There is no god. All the rest is commentary.’
Reply
steph
January 3, 2012 at 10:09 am
I’m surprised the pie loving Poms are misunderstanding the point here. The author never suggested an apple pie couldn’t be found. The English pie eaters are not reading. The author didn’t claim atheism couldn’t be found up in England either. The point is the re-making of each in America. The American apple pie is distinctively American as is the new atheism. It’s an analogy, useful and amusing, one of the literary tools used to illustrate a point. There’s an international joke about the apple pie and who ‘invented’ it. But the evidence is in history and literature. The English put the apples in pastry before the American colonies planted the seeds.
I’m destined to drive Ophelia and Veronica (and Eric) completely mad, who in their attempts to humiliate and separate are beginning to look like jilted lovers. Never mind. Isn’t it “wonderful”.
Echo…
Reply
Christopher
January 3, 2012 at 11:55 am
I think we should stop using the description “new atheists” and instead call them “honest atheists”. I am a fan of all those you call “new atheists” and am grateful that someone(s) has the balls to point out the obvious, not only is the king not wearing any clothes, he’s a bit hideous to behold in the nude.
And no matter how much perfume you sprinkle on a dog turd (“sophisticated theology”) it’s still a piece of dog shit when you bite into it (religion).
Just sayin’ :-)
Reply
steph
January 3, 2012 at 4:15 pm
There are honest atheists, dishonest atheists, honest Christians and dishonest ones and on and on it goes. Some “news” chose to call themselves “gnus” and I reckon they’d all claim to be honest. Some aren’t – I know that for a fact. A gnu has claimed to know things “for a fact” about somebody and I actually know these things aren’t true. So she’s dishonest. So what’s your point? Why do you need an epithet? Are you implying religious believers are dishonest? Perhaps instead of liberal Christians we should call them honest Christians. No matter how many silly caricatures and vulgar metaphors you strain yourself to defecate, the fact is some humans are honest and some are not. Religion and atheism are not the distinguishing markers but personal agendas or motives often are. New atheism, despite shrinking theological questions of meaning and reality down to simplistic caricatures and vulgar metaphors will never demolish religious ideas which remain open to people without convictions of any sort, for critical and constructive thought. New atheists will never contribute to this creative thinking process because they lack sophistication and think sophistication is a slur. Some, with an avalanche of expletives, will even dismiss theology as irrelevant. This is ironic as new atheism is fast becoming irrelevant in the global community. With a little more education it will be sufficiently diluted with some aspects comfortably dissolved. Like a soggy firecracker it will fizzle. I shouldn’t imagine you look pretty without clothes on. Just sayin’.
Reply
Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011 … | churchoutreachministry.net says:
January 7, 2012 at 4:14 am
[...] Read Full Article- Click Here Christian Spirituality Headlines Excerpts from Churchoutreachministry.net This entry was posted [...]
Reply
Todd Jackson
January 7, 2012 at 3:06 pm
The New Atheists do represent an important moment in human intellectual history, but that moment has nothing to do with the existence of Gods. It has to do with the limits of Empiricism. What we have is the point at which empiricism – the entire use of scientific evidence as validation – fails.
Empiricism only works when the subject of the experiment is of a lower order, technologically, than the experimenter.
Once the subject of the experiment is of a higher order than the experimenter, the relevant question is no longer whether there is evidence of the subject’s existence. The relevant question is whether the subject wishes to be detected through empirical means.
That is a 50%/50% proposition. A coin flip. Where empiricism can yeild no better result than a coin flip, empiricism has failed. The lack of evidence for God can NEVER be taken as evidence of God’s nonexistence. Avanced space aliens are certainly not God. But we haven’t found space aliens through empirical means for the same reason we haven’t found God.
If any significantly advanced “subject” were to decide, “I don’t want the humans to perceive my existence,” we won’t, whether through control of the evidence itself, or control of our minds.
Whenever I give this argument, the atheist always resonds by saying I’m trying to conclude the lack of evidence is itself positive evidence. I’m not. I’m saying that science is categorically mute on the existence of any God. It is even impermissible to say, with Dawkins, that the existence of God is “extrememly unlikely” and base that on science.
Atheists who rebut this always succeed in revealing how epistemologically trapped they are within an empiricist framework.
Reply
Still alive | Butterflies and Wheels says:
January 9, 2012 at 1:36 pm
[...] the latest one, the New Year edition, is pathetically titled “Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011).” As if he could make it be dead just by entering a terminal date. Nice try, Joe, but it’s not [...]
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 20, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
Steersman
June 20, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Speaking of which … :-)
Reply
JonLynnHarvey
June 22, 2012 at 10:12 pm
I am somewhat critical of some elements of the “New” Atheism- especially its apparent cult of celebrity and reveling in ridicule, and selective study of the most toxic forms of religion.
However, it seems premature to pronounce it dead just yet, nor do I think Hitchens was necessarily the intellectual powerhouse of the movement.
This article totally failed to mention how extremely civil Daniel Dennett is towards religion in comparison to PZ Myers (though Dennett is uncompromising in his atheism), which ought to have gotten a mention if we’re talking about civility as an issue.
Reply
stevenbollinger
August 13, 2012 at 11:51 am
I must agree with you that Sam Harris is ” singularly incoherent.” and it irks me quite a bit that so many people consider him to be a genius. I think he’s an enormous impediment to learning, posing as its champion. I feel a bit like Schopenhauer glowering at Hegel.
I like some of the other “New Atheists” much more than you seem to. I regard them as less of a unified group as it seems you might. How many of them actually refer to themselves as New Atheists, I wonder? The term is sometimes applied to me. I leave out the “New” and don’t capitalize “atheist.”
“Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did.”
Yes. We should not forget for an instant that almost the entire corpus of at least the Latin portion of the Classical literature which we now possess, is made from copies made from Catholic monks. Not to mention very valuable original writing in Latin done in the Middle Ages, much maligned for centuries by people who’ve never read any of it, which some — not all! — atheists unfortunately ignore because of the obligatory pious preamble and ending to almost every text. (And sometimes merely because it’s in Latin and some of the atheists are angry ex-Catholics with issues, or anti-Catholic bigots, and to them Latin = Catholic.) (Not to mention extremely-influential and thoroughly stupid atheists such as Tom Paine, the Sam Harris of his day, who declared that all the valuable ancient texts had already been translated — think of all the ancient texts discovered since Paine died! — and that therefore education in the ancient languages should cease. What an idiot!) I know much less about what the Orthodox and other eastern Christians and the rabbis were up to in the Middle Ages, but if you say the rabbis performed services of preservation comparable to those of the monks, I see no reason to doubt you. And of course the so-called Western “Renaissance” was mostly a matter of Westerners learning Greek from Greeks and Arabs, and then exclaiming, “Look at what WE brought back to LIFE!” As if the ancient Greek culture had been dead just because the West was ignorant of it.
So, yes, without a doubt, we owe a great debt of gratitude to those individuals who preserved ancient texts, and during the long, long Middle Ages almost all of them were clergypeople. However, we must also consider what it meant to belong to the clergy in a time when religion held an almost-complete monopoly on the institutions of learning, as it did in the Catholic Middle Ages. If a medieval monk became prominent for his learning, did that mean that he worked hard and obediently for the greater glory of the Lord, or merely that he liked books? If the former was not true he was still required to behave as if it were. In an age when religious dissent was punished so harshly, it is impossible to know just exactly what most people’s real attitudes about religion were. You may point to the licentious troubadours, who came into their own when so many pious knights were off warring in the East — pious and/or power-hungry, impossible to know the exact proportions of their motivations — as refuting what I just said, but even the troubadours were required to say that they were going to Hell for enjoying themselves so, when they may really have believed that Heaven and Hell were purely imaginary.
Many of the monks may have believed the same thing, and put up with the sermons and rituals and inserted the required pious preambles and endings to all of their correspondence for the sake of their access to the manuscripts of the pre-Christian ancients. Must we assume that all medieval monks were Christian in more than name? And must we be grateful to Christianity because it only partly obliterated Classical antiquity, not completely?
Reply
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
The New Oxonian
Books etc.
Comments and Moderation
Vita Brevis
..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Jesus Process
by rjosephhoffmann
“Born of a Woman”: Paul’s Perfect Victim and the Historical Jesus
by R. Joseph Hoffmann
One of the more absurd aspects of Christ-myth studies is the suggestion that the “neglect” of the historical Jesus by Paul is at least indirect proof that Jesus never existed. This absurdity is sometimes compounded by the suggestion that Paul did not exist, creating a kind of literary dittograph of Russell’s famous teapot argument as it is sometimes argued in the philosophy of religion: If the fate to be avoided is Aquinas’ infinite regress as it applies to finite causality, then What created God? In this case the question has to be, Who created Paul, and why?
Implicitly the answer would be, So that “Paul,” in a singular act of farsightedness, could create Jesus (who might have lived at any point in time except when he is supposed to have lived), who would then precipitate the mischief or malice of gospel writers, who may have thought (or not) that he really existed, thus causing the church. All of these figments live together in a little crooked house.
The myth theory does not get more cowboy than this, shooting at anything that comes across its path with the unarguable logic of a bullet. Mythicism is not so much a conspiracy theory as a mass of cobbled improbabilities that can only be compared to explaining the existence of a discovery by postulating that the scientist credited with formulating it was really created by a mad scientist who invented the first and a third who created the one who created him. This is comparatively easy to do when all you have is the theory and an opinion about it. After a dozen mad scientists have been postulated, however, you must ask where reality lies. For mythicists, it seems, it doesn’t really exist anywhere. It certainly doesn’t exist anywhere near where the evidence points, and to think otherwise sullies your credentials as a skeptic.
In a previous and more formal contribution to the Jesus Process, I gave what I consider to be the strongest reason for Paul’s imputed “silence” concerning the historical Jesus: namely, Paul’s psychological predicament. He is a man obsessed with the death and resurrection of Jesus, not his life and teaching. That is clear from his earliest letters: “When I came to you, brethren, I did not come to you proclaiming the mystery of God in obscure words of wisdom. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2.1-2.; cf 1 Cor 1 cor 1.23).
It is superficially clear that Paul understands this crucifixion as a real event, not as an historically ambiguous “moment” that happened once upon a time—his time, or someone else’s time. Insofar as Paul cares anything about real time, it is God’s time in relation to a historical event he cares about, the pleroma tou kronou (Gal 4.4-7).
As far as we know, or he tells, Paul himself was not affected directly by the death of Jesus. It was not an event of his biography. When he enters the picture—perhaps as early at the 40’s of the first century—interpretation and meaning have replaced anxiety and disappointment. So has a rudimentary and developing church structure replaced the informal network of followers and believers. A rationalized eschatology that borders on uncertainty—and in some cases trespasses on uncertainty–has already arisen in various Christian communities (1 Thes 4.13ff.)
One effect of this is that resurrection has replaced the urgent eschatology of the first several years following the unanticipated death of Jesus, and the “hope” of resurrection has been extended to include a belief that is not highly developed in the gospels: that all believers who believe in the saving effects of the death of Jesus will experience a resurrection like his ( 1 Thes 4.16; 1 Cor. 15. 1-58; but cf. Mt 27.51-53). It is clear that belief in the fate of a believer being linked to belief in the resurrection of Jesus is Paul’s distinctive and appealing contribution to Christian theology.
In effect, eschatology has been turned on its head between the writing of the earliest of Paul’s letters, which sees Jesus returning in a flurry to finish his messianic mission, and the belief that resurrection of the dead “in Christ” will bring all those who have died to a new life. Put bluntly, while Paul does not say that the coming of Jesus is not to be expected (cf. 1 Cor. 16.22, Gal 4.1-11 ), the primary expectation is not that but the coming of the resurrection (1 Cor 15.51f). The “historical” return of Jesus is not what he would prefer to talk about, even if it is on the minds of his (and other) congregations (1 Thes 2.19; & cf. 2 Ptr 3.4)
Paul is obsessed with this “problematic”— something which both theologians and New Testament critics used to emphasize more than they do currently. The promise of resurrection is the bright side of the threat of judgment, but the death and resurrection of Jesus typifies both (Rom 6.5-11). There is nothing within the gospel tradition, such as it was in his day, that could have solved the problem for Paul–and nothing “biographical” concerning Jesus that would have served his political purposes in relation to the wayward congregations he is trying to keep in tow. He is reticent to use the phrase logos tou kyriou and when he does (1 Thessalonians 4:15, for example) it seems to refer to dominical tradition rather than to Jesus himself. The question is not Why does Paul not quote Jesus more?, but whether Paul quotes Jesus at all.
Paul does not exactly “invent” the idea of a general resurrection of the dead—Pharisaism and its outgrowth, rabbinical Judaism, floated the idea in conjunction with belief in a messianic age—but as far as we know he is the earliest writer to use the belief as a mechanism for shoring up the flagging faith in the immediate return of Jesus, such as we find it expressed in the “half way return” concocted in 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, a peculiar blend of traditional apocalyptic based on an otherwise unattested word of the lord (4.15) and equivocation (5.1-8), but bolstered by the belief that “Jesus died and rose again” (4.14), which is for Paul an unshakeable historical occurrence.
Paul says all anyone might expect a man with a special agenda to say about a man he knows only by report, considering (a) his evangelical purpose–to interpret the gospel in his own way and (b) his professional agenda, to defeat the interpretations of others (who may or may not have lived through the events described eventually in the synoptics). It is not at all clear what more he might say if we grant his own admission that he did not know Jesus according to the flesh, that it is not important to have known Jesus according to the flesh, on his interpretation, and that the saving significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection must necessarily transcend the need to know Jesus according to the flesh. Paul’s disuse of historical tradition while deliberate rather than passive or uninformed, leads him to criticize both the temporal and geographical limits placed on the movement by the superior apostles (Gal 5.12; 2 Cor 11.13ff.) For Paul the focus is almost entirely on the next performance, not the drama as it was performed the previous evening.
ii
In my previous essay for the Process I said that Paul’s neglect of Jesus is motivated by a more sinister reason: jealousy. Jealousy is a human emotion. Its normal coordinates are older-younger, wiser-less wise, power-powerlessness, and precedence-dependence. Those coordinates could easily be a map of Paul’s motifs in the authentic letters.
Paul’s jealousy is not a well guarded secret: He is transparently jealous of his missionary rivals, who may or may not have known the historical Jesus (but there is no reason to suppose they did: Gal 1.6-10); obviously antagonistic towards those who “were apostles before [him]” (Gal 1.17); spiteful towards what he perceives as the precedence and subsequent hypocrisy of Cephas (Gal 2.6-10; 11-14); and bitter towards the “men from James” who “spied out his freedom” (which may or may not have been rubber-stamped by the superior apostles (Gal 2.12; 2 Corinthians 11.5-20), and even eager to say his preaching is not especially impressive: 1 Cor 4.10; 1.20, apparently directed at his more consequential opponents. No one who was not really suffering under a yoke of inferiority could have produced such exquisite rancour as the Paul of 2 Corinthians, and it is difficult to imagine why anyone would want to manufacture a record of this fracture in the (later) vaunted unity of the apostolic community as it appears, originally, in Acts. As if these were not thorns enough to bear, the apocryphal tradition about Paul was that he was ugly to boot, “[He was] a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long” (Acts of Paul and Thecla).
The mythicist opinion concerning Paul’s “silence” crumbles before the apostle’s puling self-defense of his mission and right to be an apostle on the same terms as those who followed Jesus according to the flesh. The Paul of 2 Corinthians is at the end of his rope, suspicious of competitiors, insistent on his role, his legitimacy and the specifics of mission—and obvioiusly aware of where the trouble is coming from: the vaunted, self-aggrandizing, intrusive, men of so-called repute in Jerusalem who cause Paul to resort to “boasting”: “Are they Hebrews? So am I; are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one” (2 Cor 11.22-23).
It is a general trait of mythicism to cry foul (or interpolation) in those few instances when they cannot prove a point by silence or misuse of analogy. If this requires overturning by random fiat or uneducated guesswork the conventional wisdom of two centuries of critical study, all the better. We have already explored the passages where mythicism breaks its bones on the rock of texts that show, beyond any serious doubt, that Paul was aware of the life of Jesus, as much as he was aware of his death (Romans 6.5-6), the manner of his death (1 Cor 1 .23; 11.23-24) and reports and visions of the risen Christ (1 Corinthinas 15.5ff), which he uses strategically to insert himself into the tradition—but within an explicitly historical context that includes Peter, the eleven, and James. It makes infinitely dim sense to explain that Paul was not aware of an historical Jesus but was at war with those he knew were relations and followers of Jesus and witnesses to his teaching.
Despite the enhancement of the story of Paul’s “conversion” by the author of Acts (9.3-6, 22.4-16; 26.9-18), the conversion itself marks the transition—at least in Paul’s mind and language—between history and meaning (Gal 1.15-16). This “bifurcation” is not especially novel: Just as there would be no pressing reason to discuss the biography of Plato in order to discuss his ideas, it is not unusual that Paul chose interpretation over details to discuss Jesus–except insofar as the choice to omit the details was forced on him by his own historical situation, by the jealousy he felt, and by a certain petulant quality that made him, probably, one of the most active early missionaries.
I am not suggesting therefore that Paul’s silence means ”nothing” in terms of the historical Jesus but that it means something significant. Paul’s jealousy, his need to protect and defend his mission, his contempt for rivals and intruders, and finally his verdict on the “ historical” apostles and claims of Jerusalem are not hidden in his letters. The sheer density of Paul’s theology has tended to obliquate these personal struggles and their historical derivation. For mythicism this has made it possible to focus merely on what Paul doesn’t tell us with a resounding and repetitive “Why not?” For traditional theology, it has meant something nearly as unimpressive: that all we need to get from Paul is his message of faith, grace, love and salvation—or, on the Catholic side, how these things are made available within the Christian church and the sacraments, especially baptism and the eucharist. Paul’s real-life struggles are inconvenient to the former camp, as it brings them to a reckoning with the immediate followers of a historical Jesus, and embarrassing to the latter because Paul’s theology, instead of inspired and authoritative, begins to look contrived, petulant, and exceedingly personal.
iii
Mythicists have special antipathy for Galatians 4.4: ?te d? ???e? t? p????µa t?? ?????? ??ap?ste??e? ? ?e?? t?? ???? a?t??, ?e??µe??? ?? ???a????, ?e??µe??? ?p? ??µ??, since there is no serious suggestion that it is interpolated or “unoriginal” to the letter. Its reference to the mother of Jesus as “a woman” (????) rather than a virgin is tantalizingly removed from the nativity and virgin birth legends of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which seem to have been unknown to the writers of John and Mark; indeed, in John 2.4, Jesus addresses his mother as “???a?” –“Woman.” As it is generally agreed that Paul has no special interest in arguing any particular doctrine about the birth of Jesus, this single phrase is unparalleled in his genuine letters. The question is, Why does he mention it at all? It will take until the time of the fourth gospel in the late first or early second century before the birth of Jesus acquires theological stature as the “incarnation” of God. With Paul, we are probably two generations away from that shift in thinking.
But we are not far removed from another theme that would have been relevant to the finer points of Paul’s sacrificial view of the death of Jesus as a “price” for sin. “Sonship” is on Paul’s mind in Galatians 4, so he seems to permit himself a digression on the birth of Jesus as he knows it.
By the fifties of the first century, Paul’s Jewish opposition included the well-known slander that Jesus himself was illegitimate, that his mother had been a prostitute. I discussed some of this tradition a number of years ago in a small anthology (primarily designed for the convenience of undergraduates) called Jesus Outside the Gospels. In even shorter form, the core of the report is contained in Rab Shabbath, 104b, repeated in almost identical words in Bab. Sanhedrin, 67a. The report reveals confusion over the parentage of Jesus and a bowdlerized tradition that he had been known as “one who had gone astray” (or the son of one who had gone astray from the teachings of Judaism), as the son of an adulteress and a gentile known simply as “Panthera.”
Ben Stada was Ben Pandera. Rab Chisda said: The husband was Stada, the lover Pandera. (Another their own said): The husband was Paphos ben Jehuda; Stada was his mother’ (or) his mother was Miriam the women’s hairdresser; as they would say at Pumbeditha, S’tath da (i.e., she was unfaithful) to her husband.
In JOtG I remarked that clues concerning the “multiple Mary” conundrum of the gospels might be found in seeing the confusion as an effort to write around (or write out) the tradition that it was Jesus’ mother rather than a woman acquaintance—Mary Magdalene—who had the scarlet reputation (keeping in view that the floating tradition of the woman taken in adultery, usually assigned to Luke, is unnamed). Miriam, “the women’s hair-dresser,” seems to be simply another name-play of the Ben Stada and Ben Panthera variety as we know it from the rabbinical sources. Miriam, “the women’s hair-dresser,” is in the original Miriam, “megaddela nesaiia”; and Miriam Megaddela, or Mary Magdalene seems to derive from this murky tradition.
For a Jew the combination “Miriam of Magdala” was equivalent to saying Miriam the harlot, as Magdala Nunayya (near Tiberias and the sea of Galilee) was notorious for the looseness of the lives of its women. As far as rabbinical tradition goes, it is likely that we have in the symmetry between the Magdalene and Megaddela tradition the origin of the otherwise strange combination Miriam the women’s hair-dresser and Mary the mother of Jesus.
While the references to this tradition are scattered and at times linguistically ambiguous, our earliest gospel makes no reference to Jesus’ father, and Paul does not mention the name of the mother—if he knew it. Matthew on the other hand seems to struggle against reports that Mary’s pregnancy is a source of scandal and humiliation (1.18), a tradition he obviates by saying that before the couple consummated their marriage Mary was pregnant ‘by the holy spirit,’ but that Joseph was (naturally) skeptical of her story; and that divorce was only averted by a vision that ensured Joseph she was not promiscuous. Luke turns this scenario, whether independently or not, into a Hellenistic tale of a virgin birth, without any trace of scandal or suspicion. While Matthew’s focus is on pedigree and legitimacy, Luke’s is on divine sonship.
It is my view that Paul is referring to this contentious tradition in Galatians 4.4. Jesus is born of a woman, according to the law ?? ???a????, ?e??µe??? ?p? ??µ??. This also establishes the identity of Jesus as a Jew, a fact necessitated by Paul’s distinctive view of the atonement.—What the effect of the death of Jesus is on the power of sin and death depends on his legitimacy and the role of the law. But for this calculation Paul requires a spotless victim, and for that reason it becomes necessary that Jesus is born according to the law, untainted by “unusual circumstances.” In effect, it is not Matthew or Luke who create the paternity of God, but Paul when he writes “In the fullness of time God sent forth his son.”
But the crucial thing for Paul is to dispose of the historically inconvenient tradition that Jesus was born outside the law–a tradition that would have made his entire theological enterprise suspect: Only a victim who was born according to the law could die in accordance with the scriptures (1 Cor 15.3; Romans 12.1-2; Rom. 5:12-21), erase the encumbrances brought on by “the first man” and serve as a model for the “resurrection life.”
This almost spasmodic reaching into and beyond history for meaning is one of the more difficult aspects of Paul’s theology, but it seems to me that there is no other explanation for why the “birth” of Jesus intrudes, in just the way it does, into his letter to the Galatians.
Far from being ignorant of the Miriam-tradition, Paul needs to deal with it. It is possible, in fact, since he does not reflect anything like a developed apologetic stance toward the polemical Jewish tradition, that the only bit of historical information he knows is the Jewish side. Paul, in this case, becomes the inventor of the “fatherhood of God”-motif later exploited in the gospels This however is sufficient to explain why Paul refers to Jesus’ legitimacy “under the law” as a fact believed by Christians, denied by Jews, but absolutely vital for his theological agenda. If I am right, it means that the notion Paul knew “nothing” about the historical Jesus tradition is false; it means that not only did he know a strongly antagonistic tradition that remained a live issue for the gospel writers, but that his early theology pivoted on sweeping it aside. It is also rather explicit proof of the way in which Paul could dispose of problematical historical tradition in the interest of getting on with his work.
About these ads
Share this:
Facebook5
Twitter
Email
StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Print
Like this:
?
Published: June 24, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
..
80 Responses to “The Jesus Process”
.
Brett
June 25, 2012 at 12:09 am
1) Regarding the first point of this essay: it is not quite true,that hypothesizing Paul as the creator of Christianity (or second creator, as Wrede hypthesized), simply passes the buck. That is to say, it does not merely now leave begging the question, why did God create Paul. Thus beginning an infinite regress.
To be sure, in some ways, that accusation would seem true. However note this qualitative change: as the origination of Christianity moves step by step further away from the first alleged source in Jesus, then the movement appears less and less securely founded, on the bedrock of its eponymous source.
More and more, Christianity looks like a composite of the work of many fallible men; especially the Apostle Paul.
2) While Paul is here admitted to be unreliable in many ways.
Specifically, is Paul’s obsession with the death of Jesus a) healthy? And b) proof that Jesus existed? Throughout history, there have been countless religious fanatics, obsessed with countless gods other than Jehovah. Is that proof that those gods existed?
While as for the fixation on death? Nothing too unusual there. Likely among other things, Paul was in love with the idea of Martrydom; like any adolescent Palestinian daydreaming about the common adolescent fantasy of being a dying hero. Dying to save your country.
Nothing here to prove the real existence of Jesus. While worse, it all seems to begin to show Christianity being deformed by a man with maudlin, morbid obsessions.
3) Other problems here? Next it is admitted that Paul never met Jesus in the flesh – but now it is at times suggest that this as an advantage; in that it allows Paul to “transcend” the flesh.
So it is better not to meet Jesus in person? Thus rendering the Second Coming and the Day of the Lord superfluous? No need to meet Christ “face to face” any more?
Then too it is conceded here that in effect, the mythicist argument is NOT just an argument from silence; Paul explicitly and adamantly rejects the importance of the flesh – and of the physical Jesus in effect.
4) Why? Because he is “jealous”? So great: Christianity is conveyed to us in large part by a man deformed by a false, distortive passion.
5) Does Paul refer to real, earlier apostles of Christ when he speaks of the legacy of the flesh? That is a very strained reading of Paul speaking of having transcended the “flesh” in general; with no specific mention of previous apostles in that place.
6) On Gal. 4.4, see Dr. McGrath’s blog comments.
7) Ultimately, finally, this piece admits that Paul played a very major part in the growth of Christianity. And though this piece chooses to assert an historical Jesus, it a) does not prove it. But especially it b) leaves us in any case with a Pauline Christianity trying to even efface any real historical tradition there might have been.
So where does Hoffmann really stand in effect, on Historicism? Note that he has Paul dominating what would become Christianity.
Indeed finally, suppose Paul was quite successful at effacing any historical reality to Jesus, by the “flesh”? Paul having dominated the NT after all, by reputedly writing more than half of it (14 of the 27 books are attributed to him). If so – then we might suggest that whatever historical reality there might have been there, whatever “real historical” Jesus there might have been, was finally all but entirely effaced by Paul, and his successors. The Pauline tradition was soon editing even the Gospels, and so fort. To the point that no “original,” “historical” account at all really remained.
So that? Even in the Hoffmann account, likely the Christianity we inhereted today, has little or no historical truth left in it.
And so, even in the “anti-Historicist” case here presented by Hoffmann, CHristianity as most of us have known it, Christ as most of us were presented with him in Church, is seen as a myth.
Christianity is here seen as a myth. Specifically, a Pauline myth.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 6:51 am
@Brett: I think your comment speaks for itself, but can we at least define the word myth so that it doesn’t bounce all over the place? Christianity is a real religion, not a myth. It includes believers and ministers and stories and liturgies and ethics; that is to say it is real, a phenomenon. Many Christians also, as part of their essential beliefs, hold to a myth of salvation that dates from when the religion began, modified over time and across cultures. But Christianity is not per se a myth and like any phenomenon it can be studied historically. I assume when you say Paul was a myth, you mean there is only a legend about him and that he didn’t really exist either. Same with Jesus, as mythtics see the case, rather than saying as they might that the historical Jesus was enshrouded in a salvation myth that helped to make sense of his death and significance for people who had come to believe he was the messiah. Paul is largely responsible for providing the details of this way of thinking; someone other than Paul (we can assume this from Gnosticism or from certain extinct Jewish Xn sects) would have framed the case differently. I happen to think based on the evidence that Jesus existed and that Paul existed and that Paul knew about Jesus. I don’t what you mean “read Dr McGrath’s” blog–not that I have anything against McGrath, but what do you suppose I will discover there that is responsive to something I just wrote 24 hours ago? Finally, speaking of “responsive,” your comment isn’t responsive to anything I wrote, which raises the question whether you read it.
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 25, 2012 at 6:37 am
Just curious, “Why would anyone use a–let’s call it 4th century, or possibly 6th-certainly not 1st century!!–source to sketch in the details of an early to mid-first century” belief?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 6:58 am
@Godfrey: What “source” are you referring to–the Talmudic and midrashic remnants of the slander in the rabbinical stories? Who said those were the sources of an oral tradition that even Matthew knows? Be careful: anachronism is a slippery business. I am trying to spare you the embarrassment of turning this into an accusation too quickly and myself the energy of blowing it to smithereens.
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 25, 2012 at 1:45 pm
I think Godfrey and other mythtics have the illusion that a text compiled in the fifth century must necessarily have been created ex nihilo in the fifth century, especially when the evidence for earlier sources is inconvenient. See also for example, the incisive scholarship of Roger Aus, who is an expert in early and mediaeval Judaism and who uses later rabbinic sources with very great care to understand early Christian origins.
Neil Godfrey
June 25, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Er, no, Joseph, I was just curious. I want to know what your rationale is. Why all the mind-reading and innuendo? I certainly do know and respect certain arguments for using later sources for information about much earlier times. I was of course drawing attention to your own denunciation of something like this when Doherty did it and was simply wondering what the different rationales are that you use. Be nice now. Remind yourself of your comment rules or I will have to ask the moderator to ban you.
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Sorry, mate: I have lost your thread? It seems you were suggesting that Paul could not have been responding to a fourth century “source,” which of course is true. Nor was Matthew. Nor was the originator of the Magdalene tradition. The remnants of this are so muddled because of censorship that we are not certain how vicious the rumour stream ran, but it does seem to have run, and it does seem to have targeted the birth, the activity, the death and the so-called resurrection of Jesus, which were also the main points pagan critics knew from Jews (Celsus, e.g. knew them in the 2nd century). This is not an extravagant hypothesis based on anachronism as Doherty likes to do business, but a clear tradition that we can excavate with some precision.
Neil Godfrey
June 26, 2012 at 12:42 am
Damnn — first comment slipped out too soon. This is what I meant to say:
Strange that what you call a clear tradition that can be excavated with some precision and even back to a contact with Paul is one that extremely few scholars have ever considered, yet when Doherty merely cites what is in the scholarly literature as well known you say he is somehow being extravagant.
rjosephhoffmann
June 26, 2012 at 7:27 am
@Godfrey: If you want to litigate Doherty’s comparison of Paul’s oblique references to the powers of the air to later, vivid, probably non-Jewish references to demons you’ll have to do that with him. Calling it strange is not the defense he needs. If you cannot distinguish between an inept comparison and a tradition that runs from apologetic defenses of Jesus’ parentage in the gospels to clear vestiges of the same tradition in rabbinical lore, I am not sure what can be done to help you: perhaps your university runs a course or two in early Christian literature you could audit?
Quote of the Day (R. Joseph Hoffmann) says:
June 25, 2012 at 7:46 am
[...] near where the evidence points, and to think otherwise sullies your credentials as a skeptic.– R. Joseph Hoffmann, ““Born of a Woman”: Paul’s Perfect Victim and the Historical Jesus&…I think that later in the piece Hoffmann reads far too much of later Jewish polemic against [...]
Reply
Ken Scaletta
June 25, 2012 at 11:58 am
I enjoyed the piece and find it to be a decent explanation for Paul’s reticence to discuss historical details about Jesus, but just to clarify, are you dating the claim of an illegitimacy smear against Jesus to the 50's based solely on inference from Matthew?
If so, I have a couple of questions – why do Mark and John not deal with it, and do you believe the smear was purely responsive and spurious or do you think it could have had an authentic historical basis?
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 25, 2012 at 12:20 pm
I have found your Miriam argument compelling particularly if the sources from the Talmud are earlier which is completely possible. It makes good plausible historical sense. All your points about Paul are of course completely accurate and self evident. Only far sighted cowboys could ignore such clear demonstration as you have provided here.
It’s interesting that mythtics are compelled by their delusion to constantly claim victory, in contradiction to the new historical evidence and argument. They seem oblivious to the fact they haven’t convinced anyone beyond their own social sub group. Godfrey irrationally claims victory over at McGrath’s blog and on his own, completely ignoring even the evidence provided here. McGrath dismisses the arguments for Gal 4.4 merely saying they go ‘too far’. This suggests it conflicts with his own theological commitments as he has no supporting engagement or argument.
It is true that New Testament scholars and scholars in other disciplines, with whom I speak at conferences, socially and elsewhere, don’t take mythtics seriously and are relatively unaware of the recent internet inspired surge among atheists. They are even, it has become apparent, unaware of Bart Ehrman’s (regrettably flawed and again popularist) attempt to engage mythtics, or understandably don’t care for it. However I think there are more far reaching implications of the popular mythtic view in relation to the hijacking of humanism by secular and atheist groups.
This makes the forthcoming announcement of our Jesus Process group even more necessary – We will be dedicated to promoting the highest standards in the non-parochial investigation of Christian origins. We believe it is critical for contemporary discussion and advancement in knowledge. We will examine afresh, the history of origins with new evidence and arguments and improved methods of enquiry. While this project addresses the question of the historical Jesus only by implication, it is designed to serve as an opportunity to address significant matters of methodology related to the question.
Reply
Brett
June 27, 2012 at 4:36 am
Any nonparochial study of Christian origins, should especially be cognizant of the methodology of Mythographers. Especially the structuralist mythography of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi Strauss.
Most anti-mythicist remarks I have seen from Historicists, their criticisms of the “beads on a string” approch, reflect a basic ignorance among Religious scholars of fundamental Anthropological/Literary/ Mythological methods. Like structural analysis. Which uses common points (“beads”?) found between myths, to hypothesize an historical relationship between them.
The attack on “Mythicism” I suggest is actually an aggressive ignorance of … Mythography.
And indeed, I hereby rename, realign “Mythicism,” as MYTHOGRAPHY.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 7:28 am
@Brett: I see virtually no awareness of these works in the mythicist literature; odd that you would mention it since in the Process I have specifically accused mythtics of working from an outdated understanding of myth as “fiction” or legend–and even the word “working” is saying too much. Good luck getting the Jeusdidnotexist crew to read structuralists. Or perhaps you have other mythicists in view. Who? ITo add to your list of scholars you say religious studies scholars are ignorant of even though many are structuralists, historical linguists (like me) and anthropolologists themselves, you might read Rene Girard; it will help you understand Paul better than Levi Strauss will.
Brett
June 25, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Between people of our times, and any possible Historical Jesus, are Paul, the Church – and hundreds of unreliable narrators and intermediaries. So is any reliable image of an historical Jesus recoverable ? Or should we just say that we simply cannot say whether there is any real historical jesus or not? Consider the evidence first, of 2 Corin. 11.13 ff.. Where Paul seems to speak of other, corroborating disciples of Christ. Thus suggesting a reliable larger tradition. One seeming to verify, apart from Paul, the real existence of Jesus, and or Jesus Christ.
To be sure though, first of all, if Paul himself is unreliable, then his references to other apostles in 2 Corin. are likewise unreliable too. While Paul himself often confesses he is the “worst of sinners”; not yet “perfect.” And so forth. Suggesting that he is unreliable, even according to himself. So that Paul’s accounts of other “realities” are themselves, not reliable.
But suppose we ignore even that? Suppose we still go ahead and look at what Paul says about other things, like the Apostles. To see how real – or how Christian – they really seem to be, even in the often-nebulous Paul. 11.13-26.
Look very closely at 2 Corin. Under closer inspection, 2 Corin 11 – where Paul seems to be jealous of other disciples – does not actually imply the real existence of any “Christian” disciples. Who indeed, are the “disciples” or religious authorities he is speaking of? Perhaps they are entirely Jewish, priests or early proto-rabbis. Not necessarily the apostles we imagine today. 1) Peter/Cephas he speaks of elsewhere – but accuses him of not being a Christian. Or more specifically, not allowing table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles.
But note especially that in 2 Corin., 2) Paul claims equality with these mostly mysterious other disciples. But in being “Hebrew,” “Israelite,” and Christians, he merely ASKS if they are good at being Christian. With no implication that they are Christian, and not jewish, in any recognizable sense. To any degree. INdeed, there is nothing in 2 Corin. 11 to a) firmly indicate any RELIABLE religious teachers, b) who are interested mainly in Jesus. Who are not simply religious Jews, following say, the OT God.
Paul says he is the equal of the others in being Hebrew, Israelite, Christian. But strictly speaking Paul does not attribute any such quality to them, but only asks if they have these qualifies: “Are they” servants of Christ.”
So that finally with regard to 2 Corin 11? The “disciples” that Paul refers to, may not be a reference to any Christian community at all. Or even, to a Jewish prototype of what would become Christianity. But might simply and entirely refer to wholly and simply Jewish believers, who are all but entirely unaware of Jesus.
This article above concedes that Paul says little concrete about any concrete predecessors; while indeed it notes that he often attacks the whole concrete material side of existence; including the “flesh” of say, historical realities, any presumed apostles … and even the flesh of Jesus.
While we add that the referents of his allusions to a “James,” a “Cephas/Paul,” are lost in notorious ambiguities. Though in any case, whoever they were … they are criticized by (a “jealous”) Paul. Indeed, after mentioning them – Paul warns there are many “false apostles,” presenting themselves as “angels of light” in 11.14.
Likely therefore, many other teachers or apostles around Paul, were not defintely disciples or followers of 1) Jesus, and/or 2) Christ as he came to be defined.
And so, our main point here: noting finally that Paul was so vague on concrete realities – and indeed, so opposed to them in some ways – that while any Concrete Historical Jesus’ original teachings, if any, were not effectively forwarded by Paul. And indeed, any such hints were almost certainly effectively effaced by Paul and his successors ( if they were next in the chain of editors, after those “apostles.” ) .
Our conclusion therefore would be that If there ever WAS an “historical Jesus,” all traces of him would have been all but entirely effaced (or at best, invented) in our present-day Bibles. So that at present, we cannot say anything of much significance about such an entity as an historical Jesus; or even whether “he” existed as a real person. And not as just another semi-historical or totally mythical false biography, taught by “false apostles.”
Previous accounts of Jesus by other apostles were unreliable, Paul suggested. According to say, 2 Corin. 11.13-23, there is therefore no reliable endorsement of earlier, real apostles. Or even of a physical Jesus. Indeed, Paul rigorously condemns “worldly” things, and those who speak of them; while warning of “false apostles” working for Satan, but appearing to speak for the “light” (2 Corin. 11.14-15).
So as of this moment, what is the difference between your – Hoffmann’s – view of Christianity, and Mythicism? There is actually very little difference. In the articles above, it is asserted that there is such a degree of perversity (jealousy, etc.) in Paul, that he himself probably did not convey any accurate notion of other apostles – or even of an historical Jesus – to us. While to that finding I now add here, that there is so much anti-materialism in Paul, so much opposition to other “apostles,” that it is unlikely that ANY real historical, material sense about Jesus, from any other earlier apostles, got past Paul. In his very influential position as chief “apostle to the gentiles,” and to Rome.
Amazingly therefore, perhaps you – Hoffmann – and the Mythicists are coming to a sort of partial agreement here, in a kind of Historical Jesus agnosticism. Agreeing that the real historical Jesus, if any, was in any case so totally obscured by unreliable apostles – including not only Peter say, but also Paul himself – that finally, there is perhaps no recoverable reality at all in the New Testament, from which to reconstruct a reliable picture of the historical Jesus.
[Next? References to various "Mary"s or "Mariemne"s etc.? Jesus as real - but as the illegitimate son of a whore?]
Reply
steph
June 25, 2012 at 2:32 pm
“”Amazingly therefore, perhaps you – Hoffmann – and the Mythicists are coming to a sort of partial agreement here, in a kind of Historical Jesus agnosticism. Agreeing that the real historical Jesus, if any, was in any case so totally obscured by unreliable apostles – including not only Peter say, but also Paul himself – that finally, there is perhaps no recoverable reality at all in the New Testament, from which to reconstruct a reliable picture of the historical Jesus.”"
What? It’s intriguing how some people can manipulate arguments to interpret what they wish, or perhaps it’s just a simple case of overlooking arguments and evidence presented here and elsewhere.
Reply
Mike Wilson
June 25, 2012 at 3:08 pm
“So as of this moment, what is the difference between your – Hoffmann’s – view of Christianity, and Mythicism? There is actually very little difference”
There is a huge difference. Mythicists are all un-intellectual and anti-intellectual and are not doing historical work but instead are pursuing a nutty goal by pushing pseudo-historical conspiracy theories while trying to convince themselves they are “bright.”
Reply
steph
June 25, 2012 at 3:09 pm
The point is that Paul cannot be used to deny historicity – quite the opposite. But sources for Jesus are contained under the layers of the gospels. The points made clear here about Paul can be fruitful in sorting this material out. But this is not something the mythtics have the skills necessary to do.
Reply
dthomas
June 25, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Brett:
Everything you say leaves me scratchng my head, but I couldn’t get past this:
“Look very closely at 2 Corin. Under closer inspection, 2 Corin 11 – where Paul seems to be jealous of other disciples – does not actually imply the real existence of any “Christian” disciples. Who indeed, are the “disciples” or religious authorities he is speaking of? Perhaps they are entirely Jewish, priests or early proto-rabbis. Not necessarily the apostles we imagine today. 1) Peter/Cephas he speaks of elsewhere – but accuses him of not being a Christian. Or more specifically, not allowing table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles.”
What? You think Paul is jealous of people that didn’t exist? Also, nothing Paul wrote had anything to do with Christians, since — and the csholars here can correct me if I am wrong — but Paul did not consider himself to belong to another religion. He was a Jew who believed Jesus was the Messiah.
Like the thinkers behind most philosophies, he worked backwards in reaction to the facts around him.
Jesus was the Messiah, but he died. So the Messiah Must have died. The Messiah couldn’t have died for no purpose, so it was to conform to God’s will.
The Messiah was a fulfillment of Jewish scripture, so the scriptures must have predicted the Messiah’s life and death.
And on and on.
Paul fought for legitimacy with other disciples because they lived and worked with the real Jesus and he didn’t.
These are all simple things that have an infinite higher probability — and are grounded in normal human conduct — than the crazy string of theories that wobble Jenga-like for mythicism to be true.
Reply
Blood
June 27, 2012 at 9:30 pm
“You think Paul is jealous of people that didn’t exist?”
We need not be so credulous when reading ancient religious texts. Antithesis was a form of rhetoric taught in the Greek schools that Paul attended. Like any good Greek rhetor and pedagogue, Paul did not need real opponents for his invective, nor should we assume an autobiography for Paul on purely literary grounds.
“These are all simple things that have an infinite higher probability — and are grounded in normal human conduct — than the crazy string of theories that wobble Jenga-like for mythicism to be true.”
Fantasy, noble lies, forgery, retrojection, rewriting history, and assuming tradition to be history are equally grounded in normal human conduct, and we don’t even have to leave the New Testament to easily demonstrate all of those in operation. And yet you would have us imagine a safety zone of pious truth and authenticity surrounds the Pauline epistles? Why?
“The need to think twice in assessing the [Pauline] epistles is particularly well-ilustrated in Paul’s autobiographical passages. These texts first appear thoroughly spontaneous and realistic, springing directly from his own personal experience, prime material for reconstructing history. But comparison with other ancient authors shows that Pauline autobiography is part of a larger literary practice and that the epistles deliberately use material which appears autobiographical for pedagogical purposes.” – Thomas L. Brodie, “The Birthing of the New Testament” (2006)
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 28, 2012 at 7:10 am
@Blood: “Like any good Greek rhetor and pedagogue, Paul did not need real opponents for his invective. Antithesis was a form of rhetoric taught in the Greek schools that Paul attended….” I’d need to see his diploma. Paul is not Porphyry; Paul probably did not attend school (1 Cor 15.21; Rom 16.22?); and the dubious tradition that he “studied” with Gamaliel would put him in the wrong kind; Paul’s opponents are real and personal, not philosophical giants like the neoplatonists, with real aims…etc. So now we are in the basement shouting up to the people in the real world-The Opponents are made up too! Is that an admission that Paul was real? When you lot sort that out, get back to me on the Jesus thing. Perhaps the less said about Brodie the better, but he is saying in what you cite that Paul is using his own life as a teaching device-not that he is inventing it (though preachers do lie!). How he is using the opponents “pedagogically” is not at all clear, so while Brodie may or may not (I think not, underscored) be right about biography, Paul’s biographical insertions are not good examples: they are reactive, petulant, coercive-the kind of thing you’d get from a Jewish mother whose son doesn’t call home variety–hardly instructive except to let us know his feelings are hurt and that James is very nasty and irritating man.
stephie louise fisher
June 28, 2012 at 11:59 am
It’s ironic that mythtics lack the critical skills of discernment in choosing scholarship to rely on. Select whichever coincidentally fits their commitments is the criterion it seems.
Blood
June 29, 2012 at 1:15 am
“Paul’s opponents are real and personal.”
Are Paul’s opponents in 2 Thessalonians real, too? And should we assume autobiography based on that letter? After all, he concludes by sincerely stating, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine, it is the way I write.” Should we take him at “his word,” as Ehrman insists we should do in Gal 1:19?
There is no authentic Paul engaged in a diatribe against authentic opponents of his time in texts such as 2 Thessalonians, merely an anonymous writer struggling hard to achieve that impression.
rjosephhoffmann
June 29, 2012 at 5:53 am
@Blood:
What is the point of using an epistle everyone agrees is a fake to measure the authenticity of the opponents in epistles virtually everyone thinks are authentic? Do you think mythicists “discovered” the fraud? They didn’t. I find this reasoning obscure, at least.
Steve Byrne
June 25, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Why is rhetoric (sublimely used i might add) more impor
tant here than arguing evidence? not judgin just sayin.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 5:21 pm
@ Steve: Odd: since when did “rhetoric” become the opposite of arguing evidence; it used to mean a presentation of argument: check the notes–the evidence is sprinkled everywhere. Not judgin’ but not readin’ either. (I am assuming that like all detractors you mean “empty” when you use the word rhetoric); Challenge: go back to para one and define teapot argument, infinite regress, and Christ-myth studies: if those words and phrases are empty it isn’t my fault.)
Reply
Brett
June 25, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Yes it would be illogical for Paul to be jealous of people who did not exist. And indeed, I was not saying that some kind of “apostles” or SOME kind of religious leaders did not exist before Paul, with whom he was in conflict. Rather, I was attempting to establish that whatever religious leaders Paul speaks of, were likely not “Christian” apostles, in any acceptable, recognizable sense.
In fact, many of Paul’s objections to previous religious leaders, may have been to simply, say, traditional Jews. And Pagans. While Paul at times rejects or overrules the authority of those we might think were rather firmly Christian; like Cephas. (Cf. “The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians,” by Dieter Gerogi, 1964; Engl. trans. 1986 Fortress Press).
[For the moment by the way, my general theoretical orientation is for the moment from Doherty; his contention that there were no real Christian apostles, no Jesus, before Paul. And/or that Paul's writings, conventionally dated to c. 55 AD, are the first accepted corpus of Christian writing; and because of that, should be given priority, as the first Christian theology. Even though many think the gospels describe an earlier time, they were in actually written in a later period, c. 63-90 AD. And Doherty suggests, their allusions to a pre-Pauline Christ, were simply anachronisms.
If you by the way, as a modern Occamist, are looking for the simplist explantion for Christianity? The simplist explanation for Christianity, the simple explanation probably is the one-source theory of Bruno Bauer. Or the idea that it all came from one simple, made-up bit of fiction. A model that is quite a bit simpler than the labrythian mess of current religous histories.]
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 5:23 pm
@Brett: Your general orientation is therefore wrong because there is nothing more absurd or illogical than Doherty’s mythicism.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 5:42 pm
@Brett: Do you also believe Elvis is alive, JFK in a vegetative state in a Boston hospital and that the moon landing was faked? What causes you to prefer absurd, complex, and half-baked assessments by amateurs over critical scholarship that is far from being apologetic or “theology.” I find it utterly mystifying.
Reply
reyjacobs
June 25, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Isn’t it “made of a woman” not “born of a woman”? Or do historicists use a different Greek text than mythicists?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 8:38 pm
genomenon means becoming out of; made and born are equally permissible but it means the same thing. You dont read any Greek, do you? So why is the point at all interesting to you?
Reply
reyjacobs
June 25, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Well, not only have mythicists ceased on this to say that Paul never said Jesus was “born” only “made” but Tertullian took it the opposite way and comments on factum vs natum and says the reason why Paul used factum was to emphasize “the reality of the flesh which was made of a virgin” (On the flesh of Christ, chapter 50). So the question is, does “made” place an emphasis on the reality of the birth, or its unreality? Is that which is “made” of a woman, that which is made in the fictions of her brain? or that which is literally made of flesh in her?
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 9:11 pm
@Rey: Even in modern Gk the root is gen- (think of the word generate, generation); as to Tertullian, a whole different ball game: (Et) verbum caro factum est means the word was made flesh in Latin; Tert. is theological enough to use that, sure. I know of no modern English trans from the Gk Test. that translates the term “made of” in Gal 4.4–and Paul certainly isn’t using it that way. It has to correspond to “born under the law” (same verb) and made of the law doesn’t work very well, does it? As to your suggestion that “modern mythicists” translate genomenon as “made”–who precisely, and give me a page reference so that I can show them the error of their philological ways…. In any event, re-translating verses out of their obvious meaning to serve the purposes of a theory seems a long way to go to sustain a bad argument.
reyjacobs
June 25, 2012 at 8:58 pm
my browser is messing up what I type. I do now how to spell seized.
reyjacobs
June 25, 2012 at 9:06 pm
And we have the obvious question of Paul’s experience of the Law as “the strength of sin” (1 Cor 15:56) and how the Law supposedly made him sin by stirring up his passions (Romans 7) — If Jesus was “born under the Law” wouldn’t that all be the same for him? Did Jesus, if Paul views him as a historical person, share Paul’s weirdo view of the Law? And if so, why doesn’t Paul say so? Why, in fact, must Paul constantly go through all his convoluted arguments about the Law? If Jesus was also against the Law, why not just say “You all know how that Jesus was against the Law too” and move on. Only if Jesus was well known to have been an avid proponent of the Law or if Jesus didn’t exist, would Paul need to use such outrageous illogic and contrived reasoning in his attacks on the Law. But of course, if Paul was merely inventing Jesus, couldn’t he just say “Jesus said X about the Law” — so perhaps the proof of Jesus’ existence is that Paul cannot quote him for his opposition of the Law! Jesus is proven to have existed as a pro-Law Jew by the fact that Paul cannot make Jesus say anything against the Law and must say everything against the Law in his own person. What do you think?
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 9:18 pm
@reyjacobs: ‘Did Jesus, if Paul views him as a historical person, share Paul’s weirdo view of the Law? And if so, why doesn’t Paul say so?’ I fail to see how Jesus who was not confronted with the consequences of interpretation effected by his own untimely death could have come up with Paul’s defensive interpretation of it, do you? Plus warning: your last question bordered on hash: I don’t have time for hash, so if there are specific questions we can discuss them, but don’t throw the whole Pauline canon at me and ask, Why?
reyjacobs
June 25, 2012 at 9:32 pm
Paul doesn’t present it simply as an interpretation of Jesus’ death but as fact–the Law is bad, the Law is a problem, the Law can’t save, etc. Obviously this belief that the Law could not save had to precede in Paul’s mind Paul’s interpretation that Jesus’ death could. If Paul thought the Law could save, why would he look for something else to save? So, if Jesus really lived, people ought to know what Jesus thought on these matters: Did Jesus agree with Paul that the Law can do nothing but damn? Obviously not according to the Synoptists, for in the story of the rich man he answers the question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” with the Decalogue. And again, he similarly answers a lawyer in Luke on the same question “What does the Law say?” and approves the answer of the lawyer. If these sorts of sayings are authentic, it would explain why Paul must use such convoluted means to attack the Law. Otherwise, if Jesus is just a myth that Paul is creating out of nowhere, Paul could just say “Jesus said: The Law sucks.” That Paul couldn’t do this shows either that Jesus really lived and was in favor of the Law, or that Jesus was invented by pro-Law Jews–but why would pro-Law Jews invent this guy? Ergo, it is most likely that Jesus really existed as a pro-Law Jew. Or are you the mythicist now?
rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2012 at 9:41 pm
@Rejacobs: “Paul doesn’t present it simply as an interpretation of Jesus’ death but as fact–the Law is bad…” Actually he says, “What then shall we say, that the law is sin? By no means!… the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.” Read the middle bit of Romans 7 and get back to me. I fail to see how, if you cannot follow Paul’s discursive reasoning pattern, you can hope to make these pronouncements.
reyjacobs
June 26, 2012 at 8:50 pm
This is part of my point. Paul’s position on the Law is extremely contradictory and incoherent. (I’m sure you’ve read Heikki Räisänen’s Paul and the Law) Why would he use such convoluted arguments against the Law unless he couldn’t quote Jesus for his position because Jesus was against his position?
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 8:02 am
@Rey: You just said his position was incoherent; if he was arguing a different position from what he may have thought Jesus had, why would he use it; if he did not know what Jesus thought, is your inference that Jesus did not exist? (My guess is, your implication is that if he could quote Jesus on the law he would have?–a fairly typical hypothesis contrary to fact used by mythtics–except Jesus was not in the position of rationalizing his own death vis a vis the law, and such comments as we possess from him in the gospels in the controversy stories strongly suggest real-world rather than metaphysical conclusions about it). If, as I’ve argued, his agenda depends on deliberate disuse of historical tradition, with the exception of a few “events,” then his position is completely explicable in terms of that agenda. Paul’s theology is situational–he says so himself. It would only be “incoherent” if you supposed that he sat down to write a systematic theology, which of course can’t be achieved by adding up all of the statements from his letters. Fundamentalists make the error of treating Paul’s letters as an opus; mythtics unfortunately use the same model when they attack it, then accuse him of being contradictory. Of course this can all be avoided if he did not exist. That would make the inconsistency imaginary.
rjosephhoffmann
June 26, 2012 at 8:11 am
@Rey: “Isn’t it “made of a woman” not “born of a woman”? Or do historicists use a different Greek text than mythicists?” (a) I do not know any historicists. (b) Do mythicists use Greek at all?
Reply
Brett
June 25, 2012 at 10:24 pm
In much of modern (and ancient?) Judaism, you are not considered Jewish, unless your mother – not father – is Jewish. (The emphasis is on your mother, not your father: since it is obvious at birth who our mother is; but not always so obvious who our father might have been.)
In any case though, there is a prevailing sense in much of the Old Testament – marked by a few exceptions – that you have to be biologically Jewish, descended from the tribes, to be considered one of the people of God. And specifically, to have had a Jewish mother.
The whole idea in Gal. 4.4, of a divine paternity to Jesus – born of a woman, but fathered it seems by a spirit – is to indeed, probably in part, to avoid the problems of an illegitimate Jesus, born outside the law. By showing him firmly born of a firmly Jewish woman. Thus making Jesus seem quite traditionally grounded in Jewish DNA. As a true son and heir.
But by the way? There is also the typically dualistic Platonism of Paul showing here. Which tells us that such biological ties, are not so important; so that gentiles, not born jewish, can be saved too. In effect, Paul is telling us next that being born Jewish according to the flesh, is no longer necessary for our salavation: we are considered “sons,” “heirs,” not according to our DNA or biological links, but according to whether our minds or spirits, take on the ideas, spirit, “faith in,” God.
This was considered all-important by Paul: because without this, without this release from the demand for biological linkage, no non-Jewish Gentile could ever be considered one of the people of God.
So the point of Paul appearning to emphasize the biological Jewishness of Jesus … is only to give Jesus just enough authority to next, cast all that off. To cast off the importance of such “flesh”ly provinance. To give Mary and then Jesus just enough authority under the law – to cancel parts of the old law. To say that gentiles, Greeks and Romans who were not born to jewish mothers, might still be considered the “sons” of God, and under God’s protection and covenent. So long as they convert to Christianity, and “faith,” in their minds or spirits, their DNA does not matter; they are still “sons” and “heirs.” (As becomes clear in the section that precredes 4.4: Gal 3.23-29. Which tells Gentiles that they can be considered sons of God, even if they are not biologically Jewish, but merely have “faith” in the ideas of God. An idea likewise confirmed in the very next section, Gal. 4.6-8.).
But finally note the irony and the reversal, in Paul’s merely apparent and merely momentary emphasis on the physicality of Mary, and then Jesus. Note that Paul raises the possiblity of the physicality of Jesus’ mother and of Jesus himself, their heirship due to biological relation to the tribes – merely as a ploy. Merely as a set-up. Mary and Jesus are given just enough physical, biological validity … to have enough authority – to cancel the importance of such physical ties. Just enough traditional authority – to hand their authority over to the mere spiritual affiliations, of gentile believers.
Indeed in the end, Paul raised the issue of a physical legitimacy, biological relation to the Jews … but only in order to reject it’s importance. In favor of voluntary, mental affiliations. Physicality is mentioned by the very spiritual Paul … but often, only to be dispensed with. In many writings by the very, very spiritual – almost Gnostic, and certainly Platonic – Paul.
Making the whole momentary emphasis on the physicality of Mary and therefore Jesus, looking quite … contrived. Something brought up – in order to be conveniently, immediately, shot down.
Reply
Ken Scaletta
June 25, 2012 at 11:59 pm
I don’t see how it’s “shot down.” Genetics was never any insurmountable bar to conversion. It was the stuff about cutting off part of the penis that people tended to balk at.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 26, 2012 at 8:54 am
@Brett: I cannot agree that what you call physicality is being shot down; Paul’s view of the atonement is physical, and he needs a physical victim and a real crucifixion and, appropriately, a Jewish one. The birth of Jesus gives him that–the victim– but he moves quickly to the last act–the death and resurrection, and pardomn the pun, makes no bones about that being his message.
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 26, 2012 at 5:18 am
Mmm . . . again just curious — why is it that pingbacks from blogs that praise and love R. Joseph Hoffmann’s posts appear here but none from a blog that expresses criticism? . . . . mmmmm
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 26, 2012 at 7:49 am
@Godfrey: The m key on your board seems to be hyperactive ;)
Reply
dthomas
June 26, 2012 at 10:13 am
One of the funny things about mythicysts is that they ignore big issues and bloviate about obscure interpretations of random passages.
So for example, ignoring the obvious meaning of a passage about being “born” or “made,” while ignoring the big picture stuff.
I have brought the issue of Paul’s problems with the apostles a few times in various places, and not one myther has ever responded to it. There is a thread throughout the epistles and Acts which depicts a rivalry between the apostles who lived with Jesus and were part of his ministry when he was alive and Paul, who created his theories without ever meeting Jesus.
Forget all the other nonsense — how is it possible to interpret that in any other way other than that Jesus was a apocalyptic prophet whose ideas and life were later transformed into a systematic religion by someone he didn’t know? His apostles, as led by James and Peter, tried to maintain the teachings of Jesus, but they eventually lost the struggle.
It’s not hard to say why. The world didn’t end the way the apostles taught, so their ideas faded away. But Paul found new ways of thinking, as I said before, by working backwords about the meaning of Jesus’ death. For reasons too complicated to get into in a blog post, these ideas caught on and the movement ensued.
No, Jesus wasn’t the second member of the Trinity who was miraculously generated. But that’s a far cry from never existing, which then takes you to a place where you have to figure out why anybody would invent him and why invent such improbable detailed backstories.
Reply
Brett
June 26, 2012 at 2:08 pm
I would agree that Paul’s often-prevailing spirituality is now and then at last moderated by a bit of materialism. And I might agree that Judaism at times demanded a physical sacrifice, in the case of the es’caped goat, and sacrificial lambs.
But if Jewish thought is at times like this, note that Jews somehow however, often did not accept the specific idea of a God who was physically killed. Most Jews did not accept that – and because of that, they did not become Christians, after all. The bulk of Christians were eventually to come not from converted Jews, but from the Gentiles. And Rome, not Jerusalem, was to become the real heart of Christianity.
So: are you sure that demanding the physical death of God – was truly Jewish? Doesn’t that look far, far more Gnostic/Platonistic?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 26, 2012 at 3:18 pm
@Brett: Physical dearth of God? Gnostic? Can’t happen: First Apocalypse of James, Jesus comforts James by saying, “Never have I suffered in any way, nor have I been distressed. And this people has done me no harm.” In the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Jesus says, “I did not die in reality, but in appearance.” Those “in error and blindness… saw me; they punished me. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. I was rejoicing in the height over all… and I was laughing at their ignorance.” Paul’s insistence on the sacrifice of Jesus does not extend to contending his death was an illusion. In fact, it can’t ahve been for his theology to “work.”
Reply
Brett
June 27, 2012 at 5:02 am
It seems to me that Paul at times seems to emphasize Jesus’ and his own ties to Jewish origins, by the flesh. In order to appeal to the zionists and “Judaizers” in the crowd. But his language consistently indicates that this argument is offered not for its intrinsic worth, or as his main argument; but is only for those who are mistakenly impressed by such things of the “flesh” and the “law.”
Paul’s arguments for the legitimacy of Christ, and his martrydom, based on material flesh, heirship, his own biological heritage as a Jew, are offered merely to those who are “in the flesh.” And the “law.” And who would therfore value the kind of approach to Jesus, citing a fleshly origin. Yet Paul elsewhere suggests that he has no real conviction in such arguments himself; his emphasis instead, is on the more spiritual arguments and realities.
To be sure, I will argue elsewhere that finally, even the very spiritual Paul himself and Christianity, come back down to earth, and material realities. Even as Jesus returns to the ‘world” and “flesh” in the Second Coming. But is seems clear to me that Paul for a long time, flirts with violently anti-materialist, Platonistic /dualistic /gnostic /”spiritual” ideas. In which no material thing – or genetic provinance – is important.
Including even the very physical Jewish mother. (“Woman, what have I to do with you?”, etc.). Indeed, there is a moment when his biological mother is standing outside, asking for him; and Jesus seems to ignore and even reject her status, even as “mother.” Jesus pointing out that his elective new family of believers, all around him, are his true “brothers” and sisters and so forth.
Often for Paul, his real family is the body of those who have elected to spiritually follow him. While biological/physical ties are for quite some time in Paul, brought up … only in order to be foregrounded, set up for Paul’s Platonistic/idealist/gnostic attack on their importance.
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 8:11 am
@Bret: Paul as a guy of the Hellenistic era knows both popular Judaism with its dabbling in magic, growing fondness for debate and emphasis on sacrifice (the Temple still stood) and some street corner platonism and stoicism-especially stoicism. He also seems to know a fairly “vulgar” view of resurrection that later critics like Porphyry will satirize within Christianity as being ludicrously physical to the point of being grotesque (1 Cor 15). Don’t forget to read the first verse, and when you do remember he is talking about Jewish theology (he didn’t know he was going to be part of scripture ;) ) And just some advice: you often find a way to agree with points that have just abolished your own. It is ok to be wrong; I suspect you get most of your information from the mythtics who are rather like bricklayers trying to do brain surgery. Many of the errors I see in this comment section come from people who have “believed” the mythtic position because they think it stands in contrast to a position they regard as orthodox having bypassed critical scholarship altogether. They have become combative before they know which side of the gun to hold and end up blowing their own arguments apart with predictable regularity. What you said about Paul was wrong-it is not “just what you were trying to say.” Not to mention, it is hard for Paul not to have existed and also been a gnostic.
Reply
Brett
June 27, 2012 at 12:18 pm
My position for present purposes, would be that possibly Paul did not even exist; but in any case, the character we now think of as “Paul” whether fictional or real, in either case rather clearly appears to be .. quite spiritual and gnostic. And in Denial of the physical world, often.
Take for example your alleged example of Paul being physical, even ludicruously so, 1 Corin 15. There, typically, Paul indeed BEGINS in a seemingly very physicalistic vein, reciting at least the barest allegations regarding Jesus crucified. And yet? 1) Paul soon, next, begins to issue countless statements that would call the solidity of his first statements, into doubt. Like for example his warning that our faith will help is … unless somehow our faith is “vain” (there having not been any resurrection?; 15.2-14). Suggesting that somehow our “faith” in all this might not be entirely reliable. Then next? See 2) see Paul’s own admission that he himself is not entirely reliable; that he is “the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle” (1 Corin. 15.9). Suggesting that his own narrative is not entirely to be depended upon.
Then next? 3) At first his discussion seems phrased firmly, as dogma. But then suddenly … it morphs into presenting itself a series of propositions, “if/then” hypothesis, in a debate, or discussion of hypotheticals: “if” this, “then” that (15.16, 12, 29, 35)
Then? Further deconstructing his own reliability, Paul beings 4) admitting that the particulars of the resurrection are a “mystery” (15.51).
And 5) then, still worse for your emphasis on physicality? 1 cORIN. 15.35-56 is mostly devoted to showing that the physicalistic life must pass away – in favor of the spiritual. Our physical body or life is a “husk” that must be cast off.
You assert that Paul portrarys a reliable vision of Jesus; one that shows Jesus as being very, very physical. But over and over again, 6) Paul is indeed, quite spiritual Platonistic; a possiblity you yourself admit (allowing my thesis yourself?): Paul has at least a “street corner” Platonism. While Platonism means – de-emphasizing the importance of material life; as a mere disposable prelude to a spiritual life and Heaven.
Indeed, 7) the whole idea of crucifixion/death, followed by a spiritual ascention to Heaven, is about the disposibility of this material life, our “corrupt” “flesh.” Leaving this material life … to go to spiritual heaven.
It seems oddly perverse of you therefore, to frame your assertion of the physicality of Jesus, by way of Pauline quotes. Whose orientation – as you admit – includes at least a “street corner” awareness of Platonism. Platonism – with its disdain for the material world, in favor of spiritual things.
Finally, 8) it is curious I should have to make these arguments to those who allegedly know Christianity. I don’t know why all this should seem so unexpected to folks around here; somehow, no-one
here ever heard that high Christianity and religion claim to be not so much about materialism, or even the material life of Jesus, but about being “spiritual”?
No one here ever heard the common sermon telling us not to be too
attached to “worldly” things? Was everyone here a “Prosperity Gospel” fundamentalist, in their misspent youth? Nobody ever told yyou that “high” Christianity was “spiritual”? That priests take vows of material poverty, and so forth?
So you insist on a very, very physical Jesus; even in Paul? If so, likely that is merely an anachronism from the gospels; which were actually written AFTER Paul, and not before him.
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 12:32 pm
@Bret: “It seems oddly perverse of you therefore, to frame your assertion of the physicality of Jesus, to by way of Pauline quotes.” I said that Paul was not a gnostic because he required a physical victim for his theology. I do not think that Paul’s need for a physical victim is proof that Jesus was historical and have never said so. Check me. He knows certain events in the life of Jesus which he thinks provide him with sufficient warrant for the real person. If you were paying attention, you would see that my argument about Paul is that his neglect of the Jesus tradition itself-why e.g. he does not quote many or any sayings, etc.–is deliberate and can be located precisely in a context that gets us close to the historical followers of an historical Jesus. Now if you want to say that Jesus was not real, Paul is not real and the apostles are not real either, I think you ought to check your pulse.
Ken Scaletta
June 26, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Paul didn’t think Jesus was God anyway. That’s an anachronistic Christology relative to Paul.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 7:32 am
Thanks Ken; your comment comes as a flicker of light in a sea of darkness.
Reply
Brett
June 27, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Ken: I can’t recall where I said Paul thought Jesus was God; could you quote the place?
In any case, it may be that current scholars suggest Paul might not think of Jesus as God, or even Christ some say (in spite of Paul’s use of the term over and over?). But Paul did somehow think that his own religious movement, offered up in part in the name of Jesus, or Christ – Christianity – had enough authority, in Jesus, or in Paul’s characterization of Jesus, to begin to turn aside, or “fulfill” and discharge, the “law”s of the Jews and the Old Testament. Replacing them with what was to be called a “new covenant.”
Suggesting an authority to Paul, and his “Jesus,” that would amount to authority equal to God himself.
Reply
Ken Scaletta
June 27, 2012 at 4:15 pm
@Brett:
I was referencing the language you used in relation to Paul and the “physical death of God.” I understood that to be an indication that you thought Paul himself claimed a physical death of God. maybe I misunderstood.
In any case, beliefs about a crucifixion of Jesus predate the deification of Jesus. Christ evolves chronologically from human to God in all of the extant early literature. I think that this is a problem for mythicism. Why didn’t Paul identify Jesus as God? Why didn’t Mark or Matthew or Luke? That gets us almost all the way up to the 2nd century without Jesus having been promoted to Godhood yet. How does that make sense if (as myther arguments typically claim) the Gospels were attempts to historicize a character who started as a god? Why didn’t Mark know Jesus was supposed to be God?
GakuseiDon
June 27, 2012 at 3:29 pm
One of the good points by Doherty and Wells is that there is not only a silence in Paul about the historical Jesus, but much the same silence in many of the early letters, especially in nearly all of the epistles in the NT. Why do we see the same silence outside of Paul, in your opinion?
Also, what of Casey’s point about high context societies. Does that factor into the explanation?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 3:42 pm
@Don: because letters are acts of interpretation, persuasion, consolation and encouragement, among other things. They are not ideal sources for reconstructing a life because they are not fashioned as biographies. At the risk of quoting myself, I said at the conlusion of Jesus outside the Gospels that it is one of the unfortunate ironies of history that ‘it was the death of Jesus and not his life that saved him from obscurity.” It is also our unfortunate predicament not to have the record we would like to have, and so we register this disappointment by asking, as Wells does more eloquently than most–Why not? But historians can’t think this way: we have to make sense of what we’ve got, as efficiently and parsimoniously as we can. In fact, I cannot fathom why Paul, who appoints himself an apostle, doesn’t live anywhere near Jerusalem, and had never met Jesus should be required to become a biographical source. As to the rest: You’d be hard pressed to find any serious scholars who would maintain that the other letters–the secondary pauline letters and those attributed to other ‘apostles” are deserving of anything but theologicalattention for the “situations” they reflect in their time. And this should tell you something about the willingness of serious NT scholarship to acknolwedge forgeries as forgeries, and the relative sophistication that has characterized NT scholarship over the last century and half, leading to these conclusions. But some is not all, and the “genuine” letters of Paul have stood intensive scrutiny, and even though not by his own hand, Colossians and Ephesians are quite significant as well for piecing together strands of his thinking about a generation after his death.
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 27, 2012 at 6:25 pm
The ‘point’ about high context societies do not ‘factor into the explanation’ and neither do they conflict with it.
Reply
Brettongarcia
June 28, 2012 at 5:23 am
The concept of Jesus changes over time; this is not an embarrassment to mythicists, since they well know that myths typically do this.
But in any case, the immediate subject here, is the necessity of a physical victim in Paul.
I can agree that Paul needs a physical victim, in one sense: in the writings of Paul, the central character known as Jesus must die for various reasons intrinsic to the ascetic lesson Paul wants to teach. Among others, Jesus must die to illustrate Paul’s priestly, spiritual point: to become “mature” adults, we must learn some self-control; we must “die to” our excessive fleshly “lusts” and “passions,” to our greed and anger and fears. We must crucify the demanding, impatient child in ourselves, that wants too much food, too much attention, too much sugar. Or in the older child: a bigger RV, a bigger house with a swimming pool, fifty pairs of shoes, and a hundred lovers.
In this sense, Paul (cf. James, priests, and the Jesus of Q) is quite Buddhistic and eastern sage-like: to be enlightened, to be good, we simply need to learn to suppress our excessive material lusts or “desires” for more and more material “possessions” (as James would add). And learn to value more, thoughts and spiritual things.
In this sense, Paul needs a physical victim; as a model of the suppression, crucifixion, of our excessive physical desires.
Reply
Ken Scaletta
June 28, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Please. Paul was not speaking allegorically about death and resurrection. He tied the crucifixion and “raising” of Jesus explicitly and repeatedly to the literal, mass resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world. Paul’s “first fruit” language in 1 Cor. makes no sense at all without a physical death and resurrection of Jesus. Even if Paul attached some symbolic or allegorical extensions to the language of death and resurrection, it still stemmed from a central and essential belief, at the very least, in a belief in a literal resurrection of the physical dead at the parousia. Emphasizing Jesus’ role as the “first fruit” for this event only makes logical sense if Jesus himself physically died and resurrected.
Reply
Brett
June 28, 2012 at 5:06 pm
“‘Please’”?
With this mere patonizing, impatient insult, you brush off the whole intellectual and spiritual side of Christianity. You brusquely dismiss the very possiblity of a spiritual, intellectual meaning to essentially all the Bible. With a single dismissive and contemptuous word?.
This is the strange thing about Historicists; their curious, even rather elementary, anti-intellectual Fundamentalist literalism and physicalism. And their anti-intellectualist insistence on simple physicality.
Here, you insist that Paul COULD NOT BE using death, resurrection, as a metaphor; but how do you know? Clearly this is no more than your opinion. And it is not a sustainable opinion. Given especially, 1) Paul’s frequent insistence that things that he says are “allegories,” (Gal. 4.24 etc.) of 2) the “spirit”; Paul making it clear that what he says is figurative, 3) a “matter of the heart, and 4) not literal” (Romans 2.29). Finally there is so much allegory in the NT, that 5) Paul’s resurrection of Jesus, as “first fruit,” could easily mean the moment that the spirit of Jesus, is taken into – reborn in – us, when we become CHristians.
You insist that he must be literal – given the physicality of the resurrection at the end. But how do you know that in TURN, is not ALSO metaphorical? Given 6) the many times Jesus himself told us that he spoke in “figures,” and the number of times were were made to understand that whenver his remarks were delivered to the people, 7) he “said nothing without” a “parable.” Given that, finally our new litealists like yourself take things far, far too literally. And 8) worse, shut off the priestly ascetic message of the Bible entirely.
9) Historicism pretends to be intellectual. But Historicism is really nothing more than the new, anti-intellectual , and 9)anti-spiritual 10) Literalism; 11) the New Fundamentalism. As it 12) insists that Jesus is historically, physically real; and that the resurrection is likewise, a throroughgoing, literal, physical event; a physical miracle. So that Historicism in some way insists on 13) physical Miracles again, in effect.
Taking the Bible literally; as being just about physical things and not mental or spiritual ones; expecting physical miracles? Insisting on a realm, physical Jesus? With Historicism, we are simply talking about nothing more or less than … the New Fundamentalism. The new literalism.
Historicism is not new; it is the same old anti-intellectuality, the same old anti-spirituality. And it is not therefore, something to be admired. 14) Beginning with its thuggishly insensitive, patronizing brush-off of any and all intellectual/spiritual elements, even to Christianity itself.
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 28, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Even after a month loitering here, BC is still reciting the same old anachronistic convictions about scholarship using the erroneous term ‘historicists’ which mythtics love. But all the term does is distinguish mythtics from independent critical scholarship. BC has no concept of historical critical research on Christian origins at all. Sure there’s a problem with conservatives like Hurtado, Dunn, Witherington, Wright, Willie Craig and others but mythtics lack the critical tools to discern the difference.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 28, 2012 at 8:00 pm
@Steph: I would agree– that mythtics can’t make distinctions between the study of religion and theology, so that every sane statement seems to them to support “orthodoxy” as they seem to understand it. What is more tragic is the infestation of new atheist bully tactics, which make no distinction between the illiterate attacks of people like Kenneth Humphreys which have the attraction of a freak show and the sober efforts to raise critical questions, including the question of the historical Jesus. I think sites like Vridar are especially guilty of turning distinctions into jello, encouraging the adoption of radical and badly reasoned positions simply because they have concluded the scholarship is screwed. It really is a travesty of knowledge, this casting aside of careful consideration of evidence in the interest of a visceral master-theory. In fact, I’d be happy if they would simply (to quote Jesus, or his scriptwriter) unplug their ears and open their eyes.
JonLynnHarvey
June 29, 2012 at 8:00 pm
This post seems confused. The classical position is that Paul both believed in a physical Jesus, and believed that it was possible to have a “mystical” union with this Jesus which would in effect create a spiritual transformation within the believer, but this transformation is more than a metaphor. But there is nothing “anti-spiritual” about this position.
In what sense then is historicism anti-spirituality? An utterly bizarre claim.
Reply
Brett
June 28, 2012 at 9:57 pm
I am well aware of critical scholarship, over and above arch-conservatism, and theology too. But my larger point here is that oddly, in spite of its own protestations and critical skills, at the last moment, the Historical Jesus crowd … chickens out. And says something to placate conservatives.
I.e.: “Yes! It’s true! I said bad things about Jesus EARLIER; but finally I see: there REALLY IS a real, physical, material, historical Jesus! ”
Maybe critical scholarship utters this as a mere cover story? But prominent as it is, loud as it is, it is really all the public will hear. So that whatever intellectual subtlety there is going on underneath all that, will be cancelled out, by its larger, public effect, its far more accessible message. Which is not only conservative, but even fundamentalist. So that the net effect of all this subtlety … is to cancel out, and encourage fundamentalism.
To be sure though? In in the above, I AM hearing SOME interesting things in this typification of a jealous Paul. Something which at least partially matches one (of my own?) more cynical theories of Pauline Christianity: that in effect, Saul/Paul really continued throughout his career, even after his name change, in the ROMAN point of view, not the Jewish. And that his emphasis on the Jewish people learning to do with less, was part of what Romans wanted their subjects to believe.
I see more here than just a personally “jealous” and resentful Paul; jealous for his own reputation: I also see him as a small Hellenized subject of Jerusalem rule, disrespected by Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and in fact presectued by Jews. A persecuted Hellenist … who therefore in part simply wanted revenge, finally, submission, from them. In the name of in part, Rome. (Accepting parts of Acts here, as actually more authoritiative then many have thought). Paul here, being more of a Greco-Roman, than a Jew. Indeed, he was prosecuted by Jews. And protected by Romans from them. (While his execution in Rome is just a rumor, not in the Bible itself; his jailing more of a protective house arrest it seems in some traditions).
I see Paul therefore, more as a Romanized Jew, at WAR with the nativist Jews. In spite of his attempts to frame his thought in traditional Jewish/Torah language. And in particular, after reading the above, I am reminded of the Roman view of the crucifixation, seeing bits of it in Paul.
What was the Roman view of the crucifixion? Finally the Romans simply wanted Jesus and any other Jewish revolutionaries, dead. Hoping that their prominent crucifixion would teach the rest of the inhabitants of Jerusalem to tone down their protests , and their desire for their own kingdom. And their desire to hold on to their own properties, and income; rather than turning over large amounts of tribute, taxes, to Roman occupiers.
The hope of the Romans was for the death of rebellious Jews that wanted to keep their own kingdom, and to keep their own income and property. And the hope was that by very prominently killing a few prominent Jews, the rest would finally submit. The rest would learn to put aside their rebellious desires for a material kingdom, and prosperity. And would submit, like good “suffering servants,” to Roman rule, and vassalage/serfdom/servitude. Handing over regular taxes, sacrifices, tribute, to the Roman occupiers. While learning to live on mere dreams, hopes, of a future, better kingdom.
So I might, say, tentatively see Paul as actually rather resentful of Jesus./ Or of any Jewish leader who was trying to rebel against, defeat Romans. And I might see Paul needing the death of any such Jewish leader, out of a complex series of in part jealous, and acquisitive motivations. But also out of specifically, Roman acquisitiveness: a desire to have more of what Jews had. A desire that intended to get it, and hold on to it. By 1) making sure that rebellious home-rule Jews were indeed killed, crucified. And 2) seeing to it that the survivers leaerned to accept “sacrifices” to their Roman “lords.” While 3) learning to do with less, for themselves.
Reply
Brett
June 29, 2012 at 1:43 pm
So if I assume for the moment, for the purpose of argument, that Jesus really did exist? Then many might well next think of several reasons why Paul would be rather “silent” on Jesus. In part, out of say “jealousy.” (Or even worse motives). Though all this seems in turn, to begin to attack the authority of all holy men like Paul. Leading one to wonder if the authority of Jesus himself will fall, next.
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 29, 2012 at 3:45 pm
What “authority”? There is a difference historical research with critical enquiry and theology and religious belief.
Reply
Brett
June 29, 2012 at 10:44 pm
Out of the collapse of confidence in authority and reverence, comes an increasingly neutral methological orientation. One that is prepared to objectively assess the historical data. And is even emotionally and intellectually prepared to face data that questions the goodness and even the historicity of the parties in question.
Oddly enough, it might be that Historicists, those who are convinced that an Historical Jesus did exist, might agree however that he did not exist, precisely as described in your corner church. And in a sense, even an ardent historicist might be able to agree to some kind of formulation, like this one: “Jesus, as most Christians know/think of him, did not exist.”
Reply
howardma
July 1, 2012 at 4:12 pm
I agree with a lot of this post, and I have a similar but slightly different reason why Paul is silent about Jesus life. What a lot of people miss is that Jesus’ life, as recorded in the Gospels, had a specific purpose. Putting this in the most basic terms, one of the major themes of these Gospel stories is to identify Jesus as the coming Messiah to the Jewish people. There were certain reasons, which I wont go into here, why the Jewish people were given the first chance to accept Jesus as the Messiah. When the Jewish nation as a whole did not accept him, God turned to the people from other nations. However, people of the nations were not expecting a Jewish Messiah, and did not have any expectations of him. In other words, they did not need to be convinced that he was the coming Messiah, just that he was the savior of the world by his death and resurrection. And it should be obvious to anyone who reads the Gospels and Paul’s letters, that the death and resurrection of Jesus was the single most important event in his life. This is where Paul’s theology starts, this is the important message that Paul wants known, because this is what saves people in Paul’s theology. In Paul’s letters, he is writing to fellow believers explaining how this salvation works and how to conduct themselves as believers, these are people who do not need to be convinced that Jesus was the coming Messiah. Obviously, Paul also talked to non-believers and told them of the life of Jesus to convince them. But notice I said talked to, this would have been a face to face discussion, it is unlikely that Paul wrote letters to non-believers to try to convert them.
Reply
Brett
July 2, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Many recent scholars like Doherty insist that 1) Paul is very, very sketchy regarding details of Jesus’ life. Even for our host, Hoffmann, Paul focuses on just a very few details on Jesus. And then mainly at best, not on the LIFE of Jesus, but on his DEATH; the crucifixion. While we might add, 2) references to say the resurrection in specifically Paul … are usually not to the resurrection of Jesus, but to our own resurrection at the End of Time. While then too, 3) our own resurrection is described in language that is extremely vague, spiritual, gnostic, and metaphorical. Not physical.
Paul’s usually quite spiritual/aetherial/cosmic view of resurrection, can be seen particularly say, in 1 Corin. 15.42-51. Where Paul – for a long moment at least – is quite gnostic, Platonistic, dualistic. And disdainful about material things like out material bodies. With regard specifically to the nature of resurrection, he focuses not so much on Jesus’ resurrection – as on our own, at the end of time.
So what is our own ressurrection like for Paul? For a long and lingering moment, Paul pictures our own resurrection as leaving this gross material, physical life and perishable physical life behind, to become a spiritual being: “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable…. It is sown a pysical body, it is raised a spiritual body…. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven…. flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
To be sure, even the very, very spiritual Paul will eventually tone down his own excessive spirituality and radically gnostic anti-materialism; even here for example the spirit has a “body.” But for a very long time in this passage, if Paul discusses the details of Jesus, or doctrines like resurrection in any length, his description 1) is not really on the physical resurrection of Jesus per se; it is on our own rebirth. Furthermore, 2 in Paul that resurrection very often (if not always), seems rather fully as over-spiritual or Gnostic. As Doherty recently argued.
The death of Jesus was marginally important for Paul … but mainly as an heroic martyr model, for our own lives. It was a model which seemed to conventiently explain and justify the new reduced, “suffering servant” status of the Jews of Roman-dominated, heavily-taxed Jerusalem. Explaining the reduced status of Jerusalem residents, as a form of material privation, poverty, submission – but one that however, had alleged moral virtues. As heroic martrydom has. The new poverty being a form of the control of physical “lusts” and “passions” of the “flesh”; a form that might free us from this vain material world, and lead us to a more spiritual “heaven.”
Reply
Brett
July 2, 2012 at 11:43 pm
Paul’s very spiritual, ascetic attack on material life, prosperity, the flesh therefore, can be seen as 1) a ploy to get new (Jewish and other) subjects of the Roman emperor, to accept their new taxes, and their new financially-reduced lives. And to accept even physical deaths by torture, crucifixion. By learning to see material prosperity as unimportant, relative to the attainment of spirituality; a spiritual philosophicality.
And/or spirituality, as Dr. Hoffmann seemed to suggest here, could also be seen as 2) an attempt by Paul, to specifically attack his religious rival, Jesus; by denying the importance of his physicality; or by seeing the physical death, the crucifixion of Jesus, as a good thing.
Yet to be sure I might finally add, 3) Paul’s emphasis on spirituality,the Stoic rejection of material prosperity, did have some objectively useful and neutral benefits. In that each one of us to some extent, needs to learn to control our physical, material “desires” and “lusts” and “gluttony”; to learn some restraint, and selfcontrol, self-denial. To see beyond short-term profits, to some longer-term philosophical goals.
So while I see clear dangers and negative things, in too much spirituality, too many ascetic attacks on material life? A moderate sense of control over our physical desires, a moderate sense of submission to authority, even with some material privation, serves each of us. As we each attempt to gain control of our raw animal, material passions, our greed and gluttony.
Still, possibly this thesis as I take it, by Dr. Hoffman – that Paul was rejecting Jesus’ physicality, his physical life, out of jealousy and so forth – has some merit as well. Finally any religion that idealizes death and crucifixion, needs to be looked at very, very carefully.
Reply
Biblioblog Carnival “according to Mark” « Euangelion Kata Markon says:
July 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm
[...] Joseph Hoffman), Hoffman continued with posts about the arguments of Shirley Jackson Case and a post providing one explanation for the silence of Paul and an interpretation of Galatians 4:4. Mark [...]
Reply
Brett
July 4, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Finally, I feel that Doherty’s thesis should be sustained here: that 1) Paul apparently wrote the first extensive body of work on Jesus, c. 53-58 AD. And 2) Paul might therefore even be the origin of the whole legend of Christ; certainly he is our earliest source it seems to many. While furthermore 3) as many scholars agree, Paul does not have many concrete details about a physical material, biographical Jesus; but 4) instead, Paul focuses on “spiritual” or “cosmic” associations with Christianity. Suggesting as Doherty asserted, that Christianity originated from a spiritual, “cosmic” philosophy, like Platonism. And suggesting that 5) likely Jesus was not a real, historical, physical person. Suggesting to me a real origin of Christianity, in the modification/Hellenization of Judaism, by various Greco-Roman myths, like Platonism.
Furthermore? 6) I add here that the argument against the physical , historical existence of Jesus, is adamantly not just an “argument from silence.” Because Paul not only did not speak much about the physical side of Jesus’ life (compared to say the gospels); Paul actually consciously, deliberately, and at length (as Carrier noted in his web comments) attacks the very idea of physicality having any importance.
An argument which in the end amounts to a rejection of the existence and importance, of a physical, historical Jesus. By Paul himself.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 4, 2012 at 2:35 pm
@Brett: If you wish to have the last word as opposed to the right answer, consider it had.
Reply
Hoffmann’s Mamzer-Jesus Solution to Paul’s “Born of a Woman” « Vridar says:
July 6, 2012 at 11:31 am
[...] a recent blogpost, “Born of a Woman”: Paul’s Perfect Victim and the Historical Jesus, Joseph Hoffmann argued that as early as the 50s C.E. the apostle Paul was so disturbed by gossip [...]
Reply
stevenbollinger
August 12, 2012 at 11:21 am
Above you write:
“One of the more absurd aspects of Christ-myth studies is the suggestion that the ‘neglect’ of the historical Jesus by Paul is at least indirect proof that Jesus never existed. ”
Does that suggestion not derive in part from the work of G A Wells? In your Foreword to Wells’ The Jesus Legend, you wrote:
“It is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus never existed as the ‘marginal indiscretion of lay amatuers” (to paraphrase a sentence once imposed on Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism by his theological critics).”
The Jesus Legend first appeared in the mid-1990's. Is it possible once more, in the light of things learned since then, to dismiss the thesis that Jesus never existed, as straying to far from the “agnostic” position? If not, and if you still consider Wells’ work valuable, what is it which distinguishes him from those mythicists whose work you dismiss?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
August 12, 2012 at 12:07 pm
I am watching with some (veiled) amusement as my comments over the last twenty+ years are exhumed for examination. Two things can be said: one is that scholarship is evolutionary; that means it works on the basis of recurrent inquiry, reflection, and reexamination–of old evidence, new evidence, conversation, rethinking and re-evaluation. That is also how science works. If the facts don’t fit the theory, you can’t change the facts, but the mythtics won’t revise their theory. Second: George Wells is a good example of someone whose thesis I fundamentally disagree with, but I accept many premises related to what he says, and he has always tried to follow basic scholarly principles. The work of recent mythics and their smorgasbord approach to sources and rank amateurism I do not think will be sustained: I oppose it, and I have said so consistently for a very long time. The difference between scholarship and mythicism is that the mythics approach the historicity of Jesus not as an object of inquiry, not as a thesis but as a debating topic, and debates are not usually characterized by looking at both sides and the betweens. They are characterized by taking sides and by partisanship. If anything, I think I have been supportive of raising questions that few scholars have even thought were legitimate, so it is ironic that my “indecision” amd skpeticsm and caution directed at both sides is being used to mark me out as a poor partisan. And if you ask me, the partisans who vigorously support “non-historicity” have simply assumed the position opposite the fundamentalist literalism they once subscribed to. They have gone from the alpha to the omega position without surveying the letters in between and without changing their habits of thought. In every significant way, they are still textual fundamentalists: what once was absolutely true for them is now absolutely false. That is not scholarship.
Reply
stevenbollinger
August 12, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Thank you for the clarification. I’m rather new to all of this, and I’m trying to remain non-partisan. So far I remain unconvinced either that it is certain that Jesus existed or that he didn’t, and I do hope I shall remain open-minded as I study the subject further, whether my studies tend to weigh more on one side of the scale or the other. Your distinction between scholarly inquiry and scoring points in debate is well-taken.
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
The New Oxonian
Books etc.
Comments and Moderation
Vita Brevis
..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Humphreys Intervention
by rjosephhoffmann
All I knew about a man named Kenneth Humphreys is that he is regarded as the clear loser in a debate with Christian apologist Gary Habermas. He enjoys this reputation not because a bevvy of evangelical zealots cheered Mr Habermas to victory on the topic of Jesus’ Resurrection (Yes: people are still talking about that) but because his own cheerleaders found him badly prepared, inarticulate, and just not up to the job. Intrigued, I wondered if Mr Humphreys was not just having a bad night so I decided to find out more about him.
It is difficult to find out much about Mr Humphreys. –Apparently even for the sponsors of the debate. This is what his side provided for a curriculum vitae:
“Some people want to know where I’m coming from: I’m an ex-college lecturer, ex-photographer, ex-computer salesman – but not an ex-Christian, Jew, Moslem or Nazi! I had a religion-free childhood and from the youngest age acquired an interest in history. In turns I was both fascinated and appalled by the history of the ‘Christian Faith’ and have made its legacy and crimes a life-long study, not because – as Christian apologists often imagine, I was ever ‘hurt’, abused, or rejected by the Church or Christians – but because humanity’s fate has for so long been held captive by this pernicious creed. But all religion is inherently dangerous.”
Like some of the pernicious New Testament figures—or rather figments—Mr Humphreys likes to discuss, the literary evidence for his existence is therefore pretty scant. He says he is on a mission to rescue people from the clutches of imaginary friends. And if you ask me, that is a significant thing to want to do.
Of course, in an important mission like this, even insurgency and misinformation are justifiable. A visit to Mr Humphreys’ panoramically rich and colourful website welcomes the superstitious masses with the amusing greeting “Welcome to Enlightenment!”
Here in a carnival of choice you will find answers to the questions Pastor Bob never asked. The sample menu:
?Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct.
?The nativity yarn is a concatenation of nonsense. The genealogies of Jesus, both Matthew’s version and Luke’s, are pious fiction. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.
?With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of “Jesus” is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn that being a “good Christian” might mean almost anything.
?The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin, that idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses. The pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: The Mythical “Virgin Mother”.
?Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road.
?“Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure”? Don’t believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.
?The case for a mythical Jesus – Nailing Jesus.
Nailing Jesus. Lol. Scholarship is a dry and thankless business. I see nothing wrong with sexing it up a little, and nothing (except maybe the NaturallyNaughty Toy Store) is as sexy as Mr Humphrey’s salvation emporium. Try this:
“The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus. But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad….”
Still, for all his enthusiasm and a menu that rivals Zabar’s Online for variety, I am a little unhappy with Mr Humphreys.
Our modest project called the Jesus Process has got his attention and he seems to think it doesn’t answer any of the questions he has already answered with different answers. He is understandably annoyed and has gone to a lot of trouble to bring the subject back to Jesus and Paul never having existed–and of course, the conspiracy that keeps the fiction alive and the yahoos on their knees.
Click to visit the original post
First we are told that “Alarm bells have sounded in the ivory towers.” I am a pretty light sleeper, yet I have heard nothing. But granting that Mr Humphreys may be referring to mythical bells, I am somewhat worried about what fire escape to use when the forces of reason, as Mr Humphreys assures us they will, drive the priests from our temple. I’ll say one thing though: it is a good thing that Mr Humphreys is an ex-lecturer and got out while the getting was good.
Mr Humphreys then goes on to quote me and my colleague Maurice Casey as saying,
“One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.” – Maurice Casey
“The endorsement of amateurs by amateurs is becoming a rampant, annoying and distressing problem for biblical scholarship … The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense … the popularity of the non-historicity thesis … now threatens to distract biblical studies from the serious business of illuminating the causes, context and development of early Christianity.” – Joseph Hoffmann
I apologize for my error: I should have known better—and I do. Buggers do not spread disease. Probably an autocorrect for ideas.
Jesus of Nazareth: Self-portrait, 32 CE
But Mr Humphreys is not through with me yet. When you are fighting against people who believe in ghosts and apparitions, say what you need to say because, after all, the Truth will set you free. Before letting me off the hook after a long time out of the water, just to keep the metaphor, Mr Humphreys notes that I am, in no particular order
(a) Opposed to the tactics and rhetoric of the new atheists (true–or rather, guilty). Nothing is more important to my scholarship than this bit of information, which makes it possible for me to move seamlessly from being pro-God to pro-Jesus;
(2) A lapsed Catholic (guilty again, depending on what lapsed means: does it mean I have acquired the self-confidence to snigger through my father’s funeral Mass?);
(3) A fan of Alvin Plantinga, or maybe Alvin Plantinga or even William Lane Craig, based on a reposted review of Plantinga’s recent book by Chris Tollefsen, and a quote therefrom which I did not write but which is positioned, curiously enough, as though I said it. In this battle, one depends on the philosophy of “dynamic representation” rather than real quotations–I get it (but false: I am not Alvin Plantinga).
(4) Finally: that I have been indecisive about the existence of Jesus. I think Mr. Humphreys likes the term “flip-flop”, but that would involve turning over and over without purpose, and I am pretty one-directional in this regard, having moved from diffidence in Jesus outside the Gospels to mild skepticism to the view that there is no reason to think Jesus did not exist. But as to the charge, true!–to the point where I would enjoy reading a coherent and convincing argument from mythicists that would challenge the standard view in place of the twittery and absurdity that in my flipfloppy way I regard as useless and unintelligible. I am not saying Mr. Humphreys’ arguments and research are absurd. I haven’t really had time to check them, since I am busy working on my finely nuanced, fully loaded views. But I have high hopes that when I look at them my mind will be changed in a flash, a little like the figmentary Paul’s mind was changed about the non-existent Jesus in the road to Damascus.
And there is this, which I find somewhat puzzling–that “having lived with Jesus as man and boy, Hoffmann, like Ehrman, finds it’s too difficult to dismiss his beloved Jesus for good.” I am from a small family and I would have noticed if Jesus had been at Thanksgiving dinner. I can’t of course speak for Bart Ehrman, but I would be surprised if this isn’t also true of him. Besides, pre-lapsed Catholics knew where to find Jesus: in the tabernacle on the altar at St Mary Immaculate on Broadway. Lapsed Catholics may have noticed that the church is now a restaurant.
I am not quite sure what the word “dismiss” means. But it seems to mean dismissing the idea that Jesus was a real human being rather than dismissing the belief that Jesus was God. Many of the people I cutely refer to as mythtics think that the latter entails the former, though for the life of me I can’t see how what third and fourth century Christians believed makes the existence of a first century Jesus improbable. This is the kind of thing I am going to learn when I read Mr Humphreys in more depth.
Or maybe it means believing what Mr Humphreys believes in his massively construed 510-page revised edition of the self-published Jesus Never Existed! Tipping the scales at around 5,000,000th at Amazon.com. I cite this statistic not with malice but because Mr Humphreys has written that
“Hoffmann has long flip-flopped between believing there was a Jesus and believing there wasn’t. No crime there. But he wants to project something masterful and profound about his enduring uncertainty by using obscure language, tortuous argument and an avalanche of complex, pretentious sentences. Someone should tell him that people have stopped listening.”
I am grateful for this warning because it will save me a lot of trouble. I can now choose whether to work on my complex, pretentious sentences or buy a bigger sound system. But the warning does worry me, because if my books are doing a little better after so many years on the cart–not as well as Bart Ehrman’s but then who’s counting?–who is listening to Mr Humphreys, the man with the real answers? On the other hand, he can be cheered by the fact that he has proof Christianity didn’t spread quickly. Unchristianity can be expected to spread even more slowly, I reckon.
Sadly, there isn’t much I understand in the redlined sections, meant to be the substantive portion of Mr Humphreys’ blog, which follow directly from the therapeutic sections (is he an ex-lecturer in psychology, I wonder?) when he gets around to it. He has clearly thought much more seriously about how Christianity really began than I have. –One of the problems living in an ivory tower is that you don’t meet the right people, on the ground as it were. I will have a long hard look at what I have written, especially the meat of his suggestion that
“Paul’s ‘lack of interest’ in a historical Jesus is quite bizarre support for the existence of a historical Jesus. Perhaps Paul’s lack of interest – and he was ostensibly in the right place at the right time – was because there was no Jesus of Nazareth to be interested in! Hoffmann’s “finely nuanced” argument here will be lost on most of humanity – as it surely should be – but my guess is that our irate academic grand master doesn’t give a damn and even remains unaware that his ambivalent and tortured message is not passing through to his confused readers.”
Damn–the ambivalent and tortured message-thing again. But (and I am embarrassed to say so) I am slightly confused. I especially want to know why this explanation is nuanced and the explanation bizarre. I guess what I need to know is why something as well known as Paul’s neglect of the Jesus of history can only be explained as there being no Jesus of Nazareth to be interested in, when Paul was clearly interested in something called Jesus. A real Paul would have been a jealous Paul, competing with real apostles for the palm of authority conferred by a real Jesus. Naively, to me, that is what comes through in the letters. Even in the gospels. It shows you how, even though my sentences are ‘finely nuanced’, they are really contrived to hide my utter confusion about these things.
Also, it shows what clever forgers and charlatans the gospel-writers were when they invented Christianity, and how smart the inventor of Paul was, throwing him into the mix just to confuse us. It would never have occurred to me, based on a straight reading of Galatians and the Corinthian letters, that Paul is a figment interested in a figment who went by the name of Jesus.
But I can’t know everything, and even if I did I couldn’t squeeze it into 510 pages. Thank God for a sane, straightforward approach to puzzles that have perplexed me for a long, long time. As Mr Humphreys says, “Welcome to Enlightenment.”
About these ads
Share this:
Facebook4
Twitter
Email
StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Print
Like this:
?
Published: June 27, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
..
20 Responses to “The Humphreys Intervention”
.
Tim Widowfield
June 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Hoffmann: I apologize for my error: I should have known better—and I do. Buggers do not spread disease. Probably an autocorrect for ideas.
Here’s the original quote from 23 April:
We can just ignore the provocative ignorance of Myers, Jerry Coyne, Neil Godfrey, and Richard Carrier et al. like so many mosquitoes.
Except mosquitoes are tough to ignore, and some carry Dengue [fever] and Malaria. If the last two years has proved anything, it is that the spawn of the new atheist movement, like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, will not be ignored. Insult works. Spew works. Faitheist baiting works. What works works.
The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense. They are the single greatest threat, next to fundamentalism, to the calm and considered academic study of religion, touting the scientific method as their Mod Op while ignoring its application to historical study.
Since “ignorance” stands in apposition to malaria and Dengue Fever in the above tirade, the point seems to have been that Coyne, Godfrey, Carrier, et al. are pests who carry a “disease” not people who spread ideas.
Naturally, if you want to persist in the polite fiction that your autocorrect changed the word, that’s up to you. I’m even up for a do-ever — an Internet mulligan, so to speak.
BTW, do you still think that, other than fundamentalism, provocative mosquito-people are the greatest threat to the academic study of religion? Because it would seem to me the gross, widespread incompetence within academia itself (especially in NT studies) might pose a bigger threat — one more difficult to face and, therefore, correct.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 2:48 pm
@Tim. Oh my, Timothy: We don’t do irony, do we? Your quotation is quite correct. I did say what I said–that “buggers spread disease”, and of course it wasn’t an autocorrect error, as I would have thought anyone with an ounce of sense would see that the term to have likely caused offense was “buggers.” And yes, I see the proliferation of stupidity in this field by the likes of Mr Humphreys infectious because it encourages people to think that preposterous ideas are as good as smart ones. To me, that is the opposite of intellectual well-being. Btw, have you learned the definition of “pure mathematics” yet?
Reply
Mike Wilson
June 27, 2012 at 4:48 pm
I’m just glad they’ve spread the incompetence net to include the whole of academia. It’s just a step away from the world being run by illuminati alien reptiles.
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 5:07 pm
@Mike: I suppose you think that’s absurd. :)
stephie louise fisher
June 27, 2012 at 7:32 pm
The Boy Timmy, complains: ‘Yes, Joe, it is hard to convey irony in print media, isn’t it?’ This is priceless. Does he not read? Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although literalistic minds will have the privilege of enjoyment compromised or even, as in Timmy’s case, apparently denied.
stephie louise fisher
June 27, 2012 at 8:43 pm
The irony is that they don’t understand satire commenting on reality, but find such childish delight in the most ridiculous flustered nonsense with no sense of reality. A foreign colleague and friend said to me, ‘ah but truth is wasted on some people’, as is satire therefore, and that’s probably a good thing.
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 8:51 pm
@Steph–
“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; Alike reserv’d to blame, or to commend, A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend.” Hard to see what role “mudslinging” plays in this noble tradition.
Tim Widowfield
June 28, 2012 at 4:05 am
All kidding aside, Dr. Hoffmann — are you sure you’ve thrown your lot in with the right bunch? Is this really how you want to be remembered?
When Mike “Boobs” Wilson is cheering you on, it has to make you want to look in the mirror wonder where you went wrong.
The offer of a do-over (mulligan) still stands.
stephie louise fisher
June 28, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Some people have the skin of a crocodile, the same plastic smile and a complete absence of wit. The kid’s kidding himself. The plain truth is transparent: no mythtic now will convince anyone outside their own social sub group.
stephie louise fisher
June 28, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Another irony. Timmy and friends frolicking on Vridar have lost the plot again. They’ve completely overlooked the fact that we haven’t announced our Jesus Process team yet, despite the fact it’s been mentioned several times here. Is this a reflection of their short term memory loss or evidence they can’t read?
rjosephhoffmann
June 28, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Possibly too busy writing limericks and drinking green beer/ here’s one:
The man who invented St Paul
Was fat, had bad breath and one ball:
His entire reputation
Hinged on saying “Salvation
Comes through Jesus or don’t come at all”
See–you can do scandalous things and not be a cur.
David.
June 27, 2012 at 8:48 pm
This is my first comment on your blog, but, I recently started to read your blog, and can I just say, I really love it, and this is one of my favourite posts, just because I’ve seen old man Ken around on the internet before, and find him to be, to be honest, quite a boring individual, with paranoid delusions (I mean, seriously, he believes the Church is a conspiring to “keep” the truth of Jesus’ non-existence from the public, perhaps, he should sell that idea to Dan Brown, it sounds right up his street!).
I’m not sure if you have the saying in America but over here (UK, same as Kenny), we have a saying – jack of all trades, master of none, which, after reading Ken’s career history, I’d have to say fits him completely).
I’m sure if old man Ken sees this, he’ll dismiss me as some Christian, just like he’ll do to Ehrman, you, Casey, or anyone else who disagrees with him, but, like him, I never had a religious upbringing either. I just have a brain and use it, and know what critical scholarship looks like (I’ve recently finished uni, so, it’s fresh in my mind) and, I do know that Humphrey’s is as far removed from actual scholarship as you can get.
Still, I do feel sorry for him, as he seems to have a lot of time on his hands to both maintain his website, blog (I didn’t know he had one), forum, and rant in the comments sections of blogs.
Anyway, sorry for the long-winded post, but, again, just wanted to say, really excellent post and I’m sure I’ll enjoy a lot of them in the future.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2012 at 9:02 pm
@David. Interesting comment. Thank you. Congrats on finishing uni, which is no mean feat in troubled times.
Reply
reyjacobs
June 27, 2012 at 10:39 pm
You said: A visit to Mr Humphreys’ panoramically rich and colourful website welcomes the superstitious masses with the amusing greeting “Welcome to Salvation!”
I clicked the link and searched for “Welcome to Salvation!” — couldn’t find it. Did find “Open for Salvation!”
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 28, 2012 at 7:00 am
Thanks: it does in fact say Open for Salvation.
Reply
reyjacobs
June 27, 2012 at 11:17 pm
And as for the idea that Kenneth Humphreys lost and Gary Habermas won the debate. Humphreys started too slow in his first speech. However, the point he makes about snow white that if you start with the assumption it is history and then make bits and pieces of it independent testimony despite it coming right there from the storybook then you end up with the same situation as what is done with the gospels. Habermas clearly concedes this point since he resolves to know nothing among us but Paul, and really only 1st Corinthians 15 at that! Habermas says basically: Paul says in 1 Cor 15 that 500 brethren saw Jesus resurrected, therefore Jesus was resurrected. I’d call that an automatic lose for Habermas myself.
Reply
chazpres
June 27, 2012 at 11:57 pm
Did you happen to check out Historical Review Press, the company Humphreys chose to publish his book? I can’t help but wonder where this guy is coming from! http://www.historicalreviewpress.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Review_Press
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 28, 2012 at 6:42 am
@cljormsbee: No I did not until I looked at the site, which others may wish to do: At least at a glance it is a playground for Neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, secret science addicts and other schmutz. Another title in their distinguished religion series is called “Did Jesus Really Have Holes in His Hands,” which can be yours for only 7 quid. As they say, “Are you up [sic] the rigours of intellectual challenge and the judgement of your peers? If so, the Historical Review Press is for you. Contact us today via the contact page on this site.” Reading the list of their “hard to find books” (with a smattering of reprints of others thrown in the measure) it felt very much like visiting a porn site. Not that I would know. To the extent that mythtics defends work like this by creeps like this, their microminority opinion will stay in the lower cellar with the rotting onions
Reply
Jesus, John, Paul, George, and Ringo Mythicism says:
June 28, 2012 at 12:14 am
[...] no matter how hard you try, the web pages in question never seem to lead you to primary sources?R. Joseph Hoffmann offers a wonderfully satirical commentary on the activity of mythicist apologist ….And finally, Ricky Carvel wrestles with the fact that, even for those who accept that a historical [...]
Reply
stephie louise fisher
June 28, 2012 at 11:44 am
It’s regrettable that Edinburgh have imported so many fundies, like David Owen etc, and come under the influence of the bullying tactics of conservatives like Hurtado (now emeritus staying on in Edinburgh instead of returning to his homeland). It’s a travesty that critical scholars in the UK are necessarily confronting. The situation in no way vindicates the vulgar rudeness and incompetence of Ken Humphreys especially expressed on his website. Joe’s eloquent satire is the perfectly appropriate and welcome response and greatly appreciated by others who don’t comment on mythtics.
Reply
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
No comments:
Post a Comment